Various Artists GSoC project

Tue Mar 31 22:57:27 UTC 2009

I should have been more clear - 'guest artists' was the wrong term and
misleading. The use case I refer to is when there are one or two tracks by
another artist on an album - not just tracks by the releasing artist plus
another 'featured' artist. This happens surprisingly often. Personally I'm
happy to put featured artists in the trakc title, or even in a custom TXXX
field.

Regardless of that, you do make some good points about TPE2, but here's the
thing:

*Users care about functionality. They don't care how that functionality is
achieved.*

So while we sit here and quibble about standards and compliance and
implementation details, iTunes and WMP "do whatever they want" ie they are
free to *innovate*. This means you can comply with standards until you're
blue in the face; you're still going to bleed market share to apple and
microsoft when users see things like Coverflow, or the fact that suddenly
they see 500 artist entries when sorting their albums instead of 3,000 (this
is the difference between Artist and Album Artist).

I don't care whether we use TPE2, custom tags, or voodoo magic to get Album
Artist support - all I care about is that I can see those 300 artists whose
albums I own, instead of the 2000 artists scattered across the numerous
compilations and collaborations in my music collection. I'd bet 100 bucks
the average music enthusiast feels exactly the same way.

You try to dismiss my description of using TPE2 as Album Artist as a de
facto standard by claiming that iTunes and WMP somehow don't count bacause
they do what they like. But they are the two biggest players in terms of
market share. Let's take a look at who uses TPE2 to represent Release
Artist, and decide whether the term 'de facto standard' is appropriate or
not.

Players which call TPE2 "album artist":
  *Winamp*
  *Windows media player*
  *iTunes*
  *Realplayer*
  *Songbird* (with AlbumArtist plugin)
*  Squeezebox*/*SqueezeCenter*

Sure sounds like the de facto standard to me..

That being said, if we do implement it we should try to do something
sensible. For example, I have tagged all my music in Musicbrainz Picard, and
this adds Album Artist information. Where does it put it? That would seem to
me to be a good place to start in terms of supporting a sensible (pseudo)
standard. Picard is open source tool like Amarok, and the Musicbrainz
community have put a lot of thought into exactly the kinds of problems we're
coming up against with music metadata like this.

XMMS suggested an interesting way of dealing with the problem of deifferent
people using tags in different ways - ie some people might actually use TPE2
to store the accompanying orchestra/ensemble. It does this by letting you
customize a profile that essentially defines what each tag means to you.
There's a summary of the idea here:
http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/wiki/Metadata_profiles

Another way forward would be to allow sorting/grouping of collections by
arbitrary fields, though this is not possible under the current
implementation, and most of the ways to do this would likely require schema
changes (ie are not likely to happen).

Ben

2009/4/1 Jeff Mitchell <mitchell at kde.org>

> Michael Pujos wrote:
> > Jeff Mitchell a écrit :
> >> Album: Crazy Techno vol 2
> >> Album Artist: Ministry of Sound
> >> Artist: TechnoDude
> >> Track Title: Blowing Your Mind
> >> Featuring: John Blaze
> >>
> >> This isn't a far-fetched example by any means -- in fact, it's quite
> >> common -- but clearly "John Blaze" belongs in TPE2, not "Ministry of
> >> Sound".  So where do you put "John Blaze" if you've filled TPE2 with
> >> "Ministry of Sound"?  Will anyone show it if you put it in TCOM or TOPE?
> >>
> >> There is only one purely cross-player solution to the Album Artist
> >> problem in ID3, which is, don't do it.
> > In you example above, i'd put John Blaze in a custom tag (TXXX frame)
> > since there's no standard frame for the "Featuring" credit.
>
> Which proves my point.  Now you're putting information in custom tags,
> which are totally fine for one player, but are not cross-player
> compatible (unless they hack in support for each others' frames).
>
> >>  ID3 sucks, but the right way to
> >> fix it is to form an industry group to hammer out a newer version that
> >> fixes these problems.
> > This won"t happen ever: ID3V2 2.4 is a 9 year old standard and most
> > software / hardware players do not handle it correctly.
>
> I was trying not to dishearten the poor guy.  :-(
>
> > No problem putting as much info as you want in the filename, but it's
> > useful to also have that info in tags for sorting / displaying purposes.
> > The simplest solution IMHO is to follow the WMP/itunes de-facto standard
> > (TPE2), or the foobar2000 one
> > (
> http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Encouraged_Tag_Standards
> ).
> > foobar2000 maps Album Artist to the first  defined tag in this list:
> > "album artist" (custom frame), "artist", "composer", "performer". For
> > Album Artist, it ignores TPE2 which can serve other purposes (like it's
> > real signification).
>
> You should actually read my previous email.
>
> --Jeff
>
>
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