Album Artist and cross-platform Vorbis (FLAC) compatibility

[Briain]

Hi

This post has been added to and 'tweaked' over the months so I promise to sanitise and rewrite it soon (to simplify it, structure it more logically and thus hopefully make it more easy to follow). Nevertheless, the main points are all still valid so it's still worth reading; please do PM me if there's anything you need clarified as picking up any ambiguities now will help me make the final version more concise.

I've been experimenting to and see if I can get a tagging system which will work on Sonos, SqueezeCentre and Twonky Media Server TM4.4.9 which I use to stream to a Linn system; I have finally achieved the result I was looking for. I've also found that Mp3tag can be configured to access the Albumartist tag and that this makes Twonky (TM4) a lot more useful for people with lots of compilation albums. I've also posted something like this on the Sonos forum.

Sorry to remove the original post (a few people have PM'd to ask for it) but I wanted to really power-trial it on all three systems and ensure that what worked for one, didn't break the others (easy to do). Album artist field does work in Twonky, it's just that tagging packages (and I suspect some early ripping software) assume different things from each other and indeed from that required by Twonky. An example is Mp3tag which calls the field 'band' and claims it is the same thing as album artist, but it is certainly not (I only discovered this by using the command line tag tools to see what was actually written then modifying it). I've also seen recommendations (on the Sonos forum) to use the Ensemble tag to define compilation albums (and thus mask the artists on a Sonos) but using Albumartist is the best way to proceed as this works on all systems.

Configuring Mp3tag:
You can easily configure Mp3tag to create a new field and column called Albumartist and %Albumartist% respectively. Since this is neither in the list of selectable field nor column options, you need to create them manually as below:

Under tools/options/tag panel, click 'add field' and name it 'Albumartist' in both the 'Field' and 'Name' text boxes. You can also add a column by right clicking on the columns and selecting 'Customize columns' (from the popup). Select 'new' and call it Albumartist. The value and field entries should then be %Albumartist%. I've also shown how these can be done in the attached screen dumps. Note that Albumartist is one single word, if you use 'Album artist' it will not work!

Using the Albumartist tag:
It would seem that if you mostly do populate the albumartist tags, when scanning the library, both Sonos and SqueezeCentre give priority to the Albumartist tag over the Artist tag. I've not looked to see where the break-point is, and it'll no doubt change with different releases of these products (Twonky TM4/5 sees these as separate tags and you can thus select the Artist and the Albumartist field separate things in the music tree).

The result is that if you just populate the Albumartist field for compilation albums and leave it blank for all the other albums, you then find all the single-artist-album artists will be missing (i.e. Sonos and SC have not assumed to use information from the Artist tag where the album artist tag is blank). As stated above though, this seems to depend on the ratio of populated to unpopulated albumartist tags.

This can easily be sorted [for the non-compilations] by using Mp3tag to populate the Albumartist field with the Artist. Once all albums have this tag populated, both types of album now show correctly (Sonos and SC have switched to exclusively using the Albumartist field). Again, a simple rule (select convert then actions) to change the whole library in a few minutes (fortunately, I have my compilations in a separate folder as this is how you make TM4 ignore the contributing artists, this makes it easy to batch re-tag things).

The end result is that you can now have a similar list on Sonos, Logitech Duet Controller and a Linn GUI (or KinskyPDA) controller which contains both artists and album artists but is free from the clutter of hundreds of contributing artists; the tagging Holy Grail! Incidentally, as far as the Sonos is concerned, there is now no need to populate the Ensemble tag; in fact, it seems to be completely ignored where there is an Albumartist tag present.

Note that dBpoeweramp has the albumartist field shown such that you can ensure it is populated (or populate it if it's empty) prior to ripping.

Option to change the Title tag - this isn't ideal for everybody! (this works well on original LinnGUI and Logitech Duet but is not best for all control points):
Whilst the Linn GUI can now be used to search for contributing artists (node 3 in first tree attached below, but now node 5 in latest one as actually displayed below), the only slight downside is that these are no longer found on the Sonos. I have fixed this and also improved the way compilation albums are displayed by using Mp3tag to rename the title field from %Title% to %Artist% - %Title% (only for compilations though). This means ‘Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon’ album tracks will show normally, as below:

Speak To Me
Breathe
On The Run
Time

Whereas a compilation album like ‘Faithless – Back To Mine’ tracks will show the contributing artist first, as shown below:

Faithless - Intro
Dido - My Life
Dusted - Childhood
Sub Sub - Past
Marshall Jefferson – Mushrooms

I used to find this better for selecting tracks from compilations and it also gives the option to search for a contributing artist (in the ‘Tracks’ field on a Sonos) but I also much preferred this format for selecting music on the original Linn GUI and the Logitech Duet Controller.

That said, this option is not as good on KinskyPDA or KinskyDesktop and it also means you can't find compilation tracks by title (ie 'Intro' is now called 'Faithless - Intro' and thus this option is not really suitable for all control points (just the Duet and original text-only Linn GUI).

Now that I've started using the albumartist tag and Kinsky PDA, I've changed back to the standard scheme for track titles. If you use the Twonky facility to mask artists from your compilation albums though, this is still the only way to find contributing artists (since they are now part of the song title) and is thus still worth including in this post.

Twonky Music Tree:
For Twonky and Linn, I have modified my standard recommended music tree as shown in the attached screenshot; as you can see, some of the music tree fields now use Albumartist as opposed to Artist. Now that I have the Albumartist tag working, I have configured TM4 to treat compilations and single artist albums in exactly the same way. Albumartist now does what you’d expect it to do and Artist will show all artists including those previously hidden contributing artists from all the compilation albums.

Hope that the above helps anyone interested in using their library to feed more than a single manufacturers system and I'll try to post instructions and screenshots of setting up Mp3tag as soon as I get a wee bit free time to pull it all together. For now though, I've attached some pictures showing the field and column adding technique.

Please try these things on a single track first. Please also take backups before doing anything major and also remember that [Ctrl][Z] can be used to reverse a major tag update; as long as you do it right away (i.e. don't do anything else inbetween getting it wrong and trying to undo it).

NB The dBpoweramp string I use is as below (it's all one line):
[IFCOMP][IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],Compilations[]\[album][IFMULTI][]\[track] - [artist] - [title][][IF!COMP][IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[artist][]\[album][IFMULTI][]\[track] - [title][]

For multi disk sets, it creates a folder per disk
For compilations, it titles the files as 01 - Artist - Title.flac
For single artist album, it titles them 01 - Title.flac

Bri

Update 1: Please see post 6 if you'd like an Mp3tag config file to set it up for you.

Update 2 (15/03/09): New (well, alternative) and smaller TMS4 tree suggestion pictured below. The other one works well too (shown in the attachments at the bottom of this post) but this one is probably simpler and thus much easier to use (it can easily be changed at any time and works without even needing to rescan the music library)


Attached below are the screen shots referred to in the above post. Also below is the original music tree used when writing this post (third image from left). Whilst it is still very useful, it is too detailed for most people's tastes and I've thus created a simpler one as shown above.

Populating Albumartist Field Automatically (for your existing single artist albums)

On first reading, the below might look tricky but it actually very easy to do and I have attached a picture showing the settings.

For single artist albums (where every track is by the same person/group) and you wish to populate the albumartist tag with that person/group name, you can create a rule in Mp3tag to do this for you. Try it on a single track, then a few albums first (and remember you can use [ctrl z] to undo changes. Once happy it does what you wish, you can do many albums at once (I did the lot at once).

In Mp3tag select the track(s) and select 'Convert' then 'Action' then the top right icon in the popup window for 'new' then name it something like 'Make albumartist equal artist' then the top right icon on the next popup window, then 'Guess values' from the list. Make the source format %Artist% and the guessing value %Albumartist% then 'Okay' it.

This rule will then be saved for future use and to use it, simply select all the tracks you wish to update, select 'Convert' then 'Action' then tick on this rule in the list of rules.

The below picture shows me opening this rule to edit it. You might find it easier looking at that whilst reading the above text. As you can see below, I have saved many rules for updating tag fields; Mp3tag is a very powerful tool. The best way to learn it's capabilities is to copy some tracks from your NAS to your PC; you can try anything you wish and delete them afterwards.

[tbillinge]

Hi Briain,

Does this superseed your post over on Twonky forum re TM4 not supporting AlbumArtist for flac files? Or does your post above only relate to mp3s?

I'm using MediaMonkey to manage my music. It writes "Album Artist" into the "Band" tag for mp3's and into the "AlbumArtist" tag for flac. This allows TM tree setup as you describe to work perfectly for MP3's, but not for flac. (I tried setting a "Band" tag within my flac files, but that didn't fix it). For the time being (until Twonky release proper flac tag support) I've used the Twonky configuration option to tell it that everything within the "compilations" folder should be excluded from the Artist tree nodes. But, as you point out, there is then no way to have a node that *does* include the contibuting artists.

I can't see that your post above solves this for flac, but am I missing something?

Tim.

[bbrip]

tbillinge Wrote:Hi Briain,

Does this superseed your post over on Twonky forum re TM4 not supporting AlbumArtist for flac files? Or does your post above only relate to mp3s?

I'm using MediaMonkey to manage my music. It writes "Album Artist" into the "Band" tag for mp3's and into the "AlbumArtist" tag for flac. This allows TM tree setup as you describe to work perfectly for MP3's, but not for flac. (I tried setting a "Band" tag within my flac files, but that didn't fix it). For the time being (until Twonky release proper flac tag support) I've used the Twonky configuration option to tell it that everything within the "compilations" folder should be excluded from the Artist tree nodes. But, as you point out, there is then no way to have a node that *does* include the contibuting artists.

I can't see that your post above solves this for flac, but am I missing something?

Tim.

What Briain is saying, is that the Tag "Albumartist" (Important: IN ONE WORD!!!) will work in Twonky also on FLAC files!

I had the same issues before and it was due to the fact, that some programs tag "Albumartist" as "Album Artist", ie with a blank inbetween. Most systems (like Sonos) pick the tag up nonetheless, but in Twonky the tag has got to be "Albumartist" to show up correctly.

Briain, thanks for the great write-up. I got my tags organised in a very similar way. As a classic music guy, my distiction between "Albumartist" and "Artist" (referred to in Twonky as "Contributing Artist" s, that I use the Albumartist for the "main" Artist, the "COntributing Artist" for the full set of artists,

ie in a Violinconcerto I might use Albumartist for "Mutter, Anne Sophie" and "Artist" for "Anne-Sophie Mutter, Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by James Levine"

[Briain]

tbillinge Wrote:Hi Briain,

Does this superseed your post over on Twonky forum re TM4 not supporting AlbumArtist for flac files? Or does your post above only relate to mp3s?

I'm using MediaMonkey to manage my music. It writes "Album Artist" into the "Band" tag for mp3's and into the "AlbumArtist" tag for flac. This allows TM tree setup as you describe to work perfectly for MP3's, but not for flac. (I tried setting a "Band" tag within my flac files, but that didn't fix it). For the time being (until Twonky release proper flac tag support) I've used the Twonky configuration option to tell it that everything within the "compilations" folder should be excluded from the Artist tree nodes. But, as you point out, there is then no way to have a node that *does* include the contibuting artists.

I can't see that your post above solves this for flac, but am I missing something?

Tim.

Hi Tim

Until recently, I thought it didn't work and was informed by Twonky (ages ago) that they had no intension of fixing it. It was only when I discovered an entry (from a downloaded track) that I wondered how to make it work. I assumed that the entry was under some other tag but the command line utilities showed that it was actually Albumartist!

So yes, it does fully work with FLAC and probably has for quite some time; I think it's just that many software packages get it wrong and everyone has just been assuming that it doesn't work ever since! I have now put FLAC in the title just to clarify that I'm not talking about MP3's

Ages ago, Mp3tag claimed that with their product, BAND = ALBUMARTIST but that is incorrect; the Sonos forum claim that people should populate the Ensemble tag to group compilation albums (and thus save the Artist list from 'exploding' with all the contributing artists) but that's not an ideal solution since nothing else seels to use that tag. SqueezeCentre seems to simply look at a group of tracks in a single album and if it sees multiple artists, classify it as a compilation (this option is selectable in the SC settings).

It's an odd situation: I tried about 50 random entries (most scattered but 10 were for a whole comp album) and it seems that even after a full database rebuild, both Sonos and SC7 ignored the Albumartist field. Only after I'd assigned an album artist for every compilation album and rebuilt the databases, I found that Sonos and SC7 had suddenly decided to completely ignore the Artist tag in favour of Albumartist! I then copied the artists to the Albumartist tags (on all non-compilations) and ended up with exactly what I wanted; a single list of album and compilation artists but without the contributing artists cluttering it up.

Since Twonky TM4 correctly distinguishes between Album and Albumartist, in many ways it now transforms Twonky (plus the Linn GUI or Kinsky PDA) into one of the best solutions for navigating and playing music; the contributing artists can now be fully listed if required (Artist) but masked for normal use (Albumartist).

As with yourself, I used to keep all my compilations in a separate container in order to avoid the artist list 'exploding'. Now that I have the Albumartist field functioning, I have also removed the path from the compilation directories settings and can now see all artists under node 3 of the tree options shown in my first post.

Bri

[Briain]

bbrip Wrote:What Briain is saying, is that the Tag "Albumartist" (Important: IN ONE WORD!!!) will work in Twonky also on FLAC files!

I had the same issues before and it was due to the fact, that some programs tag "Albumartist" as "Album Artist", ie with a blank inbetween. Most systems (like Sonos) pick the tag up nonetheless, but in Twonky the tag has got to be "Albumartist" to show up correctly.

Briain, thanks for the great write-up. I got my tags organised in a very similar way. As a classic music guy, my distiction between "Albumartist" and "Artist" (referred to in Twonky as "Contributing Artist" s, that I use the Albumartist for the "main" Artist, the "COntributing Artist" for the full set of artists,

ie in a Violinconcerto I might use Albumartist for "Mutter, Anne Sophie" and "Artist" for "Anne-Sophie Mutter, Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by James Levine"

Hi

Yes indeed, that additional space is one of the problems I've spotted; it's most likely why everyone assumed that Twonky didn't work and in reality was the fault of the other vendors all along! I must say though that Twonky really ought to have known that and helped everyone who asked them to fix it; they obviously didn't even bother to investigate the complaints about it and just assumed it was broken themselves! It just shows what a mess they were in throughout the entire 2008 period and it's really good to at last see indications that they are starting to move forwards again.

Getting the Albumartist to work has massively improved the usability of my system and the ability to now find tracks from contributing artists is simply great!

Bri

[Briain]

Hi

To save having to add the Albumartist fields and columns to Mp3tag the hard way, you can import the configuration settings from my configuration file to activate the required fields/columns as shown in the attached picture.

In addition to the additional fields, the configuration file also has some useful tag manipulation options (Actions) like changing punctuation in tags and copying Artist to Albumartist; see first post about also assigning an Albumartist tag to single artist albums (as well as assigning an album artist to compilation albums). Also see attached image showing tagging for both a compilation and a single artist album (a picture being worth 1000 words). Some of these actions will be of use as they are, and by looking at the format of the actions to see how they have been constructed, you will easily be able to see how to create your own ones.

If you open Mp3tag and select [File] then [Save Configuration] it will save the standard configuration (that you have at the moment). The pop up window also tells you where to restore your configuration files should you need so to do. The place it tells you to restore the files to is obviously the same place you'd paste my configuration files to and thus overwrite the standard ones (there's a picture attached showing what I mean).

Also attached is a picture of how Mp3tag will look after importing my configuration files and as you can see, the ‘Actions’ window is open showing some of the rules I use to tweak any tag punctuation etc. You probably won’t need to use these actions but they’re really useful if you intend exporting tag information to a CSV file and then into a database as some (particularly classical) album tags have semicolons in the path which totally wreck the database (by moving everything one field to the right).

I hope this makes sense and the best way to use it is to rip a CD and experiment with the tags (and actions if you wish) to familiarise yourself with what they do before attacking your precious music collection.

If you wish the zip file, please send me an email to radio @ btinternet . com (without the spaces) or PM me on this forum. If it works well, it was my idea and I like red wine, if it doesn’t (and you trash your music collection) it was Linn Product’s idea and they’re located near Eaglesham

Bri

[kirkus]

Briain Wrote:Since Twonky TM4 correctly distinguishes between Album and Albumartist, in many ways it now transforms Twonky (plus the Linn GUI or Kinsky PDA) into one of the best solutions for navigating and playing music; the contributing artists can now be fully listed if required (Artist) but masked for normal use (Albumartist).

So forgive me if I'm missing something . . . but are you using multiple "artist" fields for a given track or album, such that a given album has a listing under each artist in the tree? If so, how do you do this?

[Briain]

Hi

You'll already realise most of this, but just for everybody's benefit, artist and albumartist are two completely different tags. Each FLAC track has these (and other) tags written to it. One part of the media server (like Twonky) is just a big database which contains all tags for all tracks and it is simply the because several tracks have the same album tag (eg Dark Side of the Moon) that the media server groups them into what looks like a single album on the display (they could be scattered over different folders on different parts of the hard drive; that doesn't matter).

The same applies for albumartist and artist tags; these are written to each and every track and it is the job of the media server to interpret them into a group (like artist, albumartist, genre etc). So what we're doing here is to create two different ways to group tracks on the display.

If you look at the music tree in my first post, it is slightly different to what you'd normally see. Usually, the entries for node 1 would be artist then album, but in mine, it's albumartist then album.

For single artist albums, like Pink Floyd, the artist tag is obviously Pink Floyd and I’ve made the albumartist tag Pink Floyd as well. For compilations, there will be a single albumartist name for the whole album (the albumartist tag for each track will be the same) but the artist tag for each track could (probably will) be different.

This means that if you only had two albums, say a Pink Floyd album and a John Peel collection of bands, you'd use these two names for the albumartist tags (Pink Floyd and John Peel). If you now looked in node 1, you'd see two artist's with albums (one artist being Pink Floyd and the other being John Peel). If you looked in Node 3, you'd see all the contributing artists in your collection (including Pink Floyd).

If you want to find out which album a track is on, you can use Node 9 (you can then find Pink Floyd's Money is on Dark Side of the Moon or that CSNY's Wooden Ships track is on Woodstock.

You could have another node with Track and Album to find which album a track is on (without knowing the artist's name). So, you'd look for Money and it would show the album as Dark Side of the Moon.

This is really useful if you have a LOT of compilations. In my case, the albumartist list is just over 600 but the artist list is well over 5000. If I didn't sort it out as above, you'd have to wade through a list of 5000 artists to find Pink Floyd then find out which albums you had.

Hope that helps
Bri

[Kana]

Briain,

Some very useful tips & advice, particularly the option to use the "Artist" field to find all tracks by an artist in single artist & compilation albums - so long as one removes the Compilation entry on Twonky. One other option is to use the 'albumartist' field as a composer field for those with large classical collections, with a converter to do that - frigging the music tree on Twonky to refer to the 'albumartist' tag as composer. Just an interim while they sort themselves out.

I have implemented some of your suggestions - but in case anyone else is having my problem...Why does MP3tag (and MonkeyMedia) sometimes take ages to make a single tag change e.g. copying the 'artist' field to 'albumartist'. I have over 8,000 track to convert and it took over 6 hours to do about 800 compilation tracks. PC with Vista, Netgear router & QNAP TS 409. Some changes whip through & others take forever! Any ideas welcome.

[bbrip]

...and to add a flavor for the classic music fans among us:

You can use Artist and AlbumArtist tags as follows: Lets assume you have various recordings of violin concertos of Anne Sophie Mutter. But the Brahms is recorded with the New York Phil conducted by Kurt Masur, The Beethoven is with the Vienna Philharmonic unde Claudio Abbado, the Sibelius is with the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle etc. etc

If you now assign Anne Sophie Mutter as "AlbumArtist" and the respective orchestras and conductors under "Artist" you get a clean and organised way to see all your recordngs with Anne SOphie Mutter, showing the orchestras and conductors involved in the "Artist" tag (also referred to as "Contributing Artist" by Twonky. field).

Hope this explains