Muti-artist songs, is there a correct way to do this?

[xterminus]

I organize my music collection with the picard tagger (with the lastfmplus plugin for good measure).  It works great but I have a few questions about how gmusicbrowser behaves when multiple artists are recorded into the artist or album artist id3 tags.

Currently, when a mp3 is processed with "feat. xxx" or "featuring xxx" in the mp3 song title tag, I have picard move that information into the artist tag, with artists seperated via a semicolon, which is the same as how multiple genres, moods, etc are stored in the tags.  I notice gmusicbrowser likes to replace this with a "/" in the tag when I allow it to write to files.  Is there a way to change this behavior to "leave the artist tag alone", or should I just get used it?

I also notice that when gmusicbrowser submits songs to last.fm/libre.fm via plugin, it submits the entire artist tag with the "/" or ";" instead of just picking out the first artist in the list as the proper artist send along.  In windows (which I rarely use), my preferred media player (mediamonkey) does it this way.  Is there a way to tweak this behavior?

[Quentin Sculo]

Currently the support for multi-artist is far from perfect, mostly I tried to make it smart by using only one field and by making it aware that when a track had artist A & B, it knew that there was artist A and artist B.
A typical good example of what was intended is "Neil Young & Crazy Horse" where there are songs with only Neil Young and others with only Crazy Horse. In that case submitting only "Neil Young" to last.fm wouldn't be the right thing.
But it doesn't work that well in all cases, for example I currently use in my collection "Jimmy Page & Robert Plant" instead of the official "Page & Plant" so that gmb knows the 2 individual artists, but of course last.fm doesn't like this.

For the "feat." case you can put it in the title, gmb can extract it (see misc options) so that the "artists" virtual field will contain it, but the "artist" field will be untouched. Note that the "feat. X" will still appear in the title.

One solution would be using the album_artist field for the official artist name, and the artist field for the list of artists, but that wouldn't work for compilations (though I'm not a fan of compilations it is a problem)

But really what is needed is a proper artists field that would contain the band, guest artists, and even the names of the band members and band aliases.
The fmps standard propose a ~"list of artist" field, but it is a bit too complicated for my taste, as it is supposed to contain the role of each artist : A : vocal, B : guitar ...  So I'm not sure I'll use that.


To answer your questions :
I don't think gmb replace "A ; B" by "A / B", as far as tag edition is concerned, the artist field is treated as a simple text field.
To submit only the first artist to last.fm, currently you'll have to edit the plugins/audioscrobbler.pm file : replacing the two occurrences of "title artist album track" by "title first_artist album track" should work. (One occurrence is for "now playing" the other for submitting a played song)

[xterminus]

To submit only the first artist to last.fm, currently you'll have to edit the plugins/audioscrobbler.pm file : replacing the two occurrences of "title artist album track" by "title first_artist album track" should work. (One occurrence is for "now playing" the other for submitting a played song)

Tweaking audioscrobbler.pm worked just fine for what I wanted.  Now it's submitting what I expect.  Thanks!  I imagine I'll need to re-tweak it after every update that comes down via the ppa, but at least at this point it's working and I have a fix.

As to the correct way of handling multiple artists, It seems like there are a bunch of different ways to do it, as you indicated above.  I'm kind of a picky customer when it comes to all the music I've amassed, so I end up sorting things out "my way".  I was mostly curious as to how it was "supposed" to be handled.  I doubt I'll ever be a fan of embedding the featured artist in the title tag via feat. X, though I see a lot of that especially in Single/Remixes/etc.

I've been using gmb for about a year now, and I'm fairly happy with it, which is unusual.  Before I discovered gmb, I kind of bounced between rythmbox, banshee, amarok, or whatever cool player of the week seemed to be popping up in the news.  I still have a bunch of perl and python scripts lying around that convert databases between various players.  I remember at one point I had a cron job running at night that synced the banshee and rhythmbox databases because I couldn't make up my mind.  I'm kinda glad I don't need to use em anymore.  gmb is the only player (on linux) that I've found seems to handle multiple genre, mood, whatever tags in a semi-decent way.  I'd end up with a horrible mess with pretty much anything else.