Mastodawn

I have refined my desire for how to organize artists in a music player app

I think what I want is:

a list of all artists from MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID
with a list of all albums that artist appears on, when you move to the artist page
so long as that artist appears at least once in the library as a solo entry in MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID
with a separate section on the artist page for albums that artist appears on, but isn't listed as an album artist on

this feels like the right middle ground between "a list of all the artists, spamming you with one-offs from all the artists on your doujin albums" and "you get the album artist, exactly as written in the tag, so if you want an album that's by Your Favorite Artist ft. Someone You Don't Remember it's listed as its own artist and you have to find it"

this would need musicbrainz API connectivity so that it could canonicalize the artist names; technically it could do this just by parsing the fields (I believe picard tags things in a consistent order) but API connectivity would be easier and more reliable

and now that I've figured out what I want I, uh

really want this, actually

damien 🥖🐈‍⬛🧣4d ago

@demize I'd need to dig into how it's done in practice but Feishin + Navidrome (and probably OpenSubsonic) does what you want AFAICT.

@eramdam oh damn, it does

damien 🥖🐈‍⬛🧣4d ago

@demize ok afaict it's Feishin massaging the Navidrome data since it supplies a `participants` field on albums so that sort of stuff is easy to do

damien 🥖🐈‍⬛🧣4d ago

@demize now Idk if that stuff works without musicbrain ids for artists but

@eramdam I think it's just using the album artist field, there's no canonicalization... which is mostly-fine actually?

it does leave me with a "Porter Robinson & Riot Games Music Team" album artist that I would like to be canonicalized to just "Porter Robinson" (the MBID is just Porter's, it's not actually entered as multiple artists [like I would have, grumble grumble], so it should be treated as the same artist but... eh)

@eramdam and that can be fixed actually by just redoing the tags, someone has updated it to be "Porter Robinson & League of Legends" as two separate artists

damien 🥖🐈‍⬛🧣4d ago

@demize yeah i was gonna say, that stuff should mostly just work if you pull from MB IME.

@eramdam it depends on how it's entered :p

this was tagged with all the MBIDs already but when it was first entered someone did it wrong

damien 🥖🐈‍⬛🧣4d ago

@demize ough, well. i know beets can "sync" from MB to update tags after the fact but idk how easy that stuff is to do without re-importing with other software.

(I'd love to automate the "sync" stuff but it, as of right now, doesn't respect the language-aware aliases so I'd end up with kana for all artists who have an English name registered in MB 😩 )

@eramdam with my Totally Normal Workflow it's not too bad

move the folder out, open it in picard, it recognizes the tags and pulls up the right release, save it, ctrl+r,"music rename fol",tab,enter, ctrl+r,"music rename fil",tab,enter, then move the new folder back

damien 🥖🐈‍⬛🧣4d ago

damien 🥖🐈‍⬛🧣4d ago

@demize meanwhile with beets it's either `beet import -L <path>` or `beet mbsync <query>` :p

@eramdam yeah but I didn't like beets, for some reason I can't remember, and stopped using it