MinimServer with SongKong: Part 7: Album Artist

Go forward to  Part 8: Date
Go back to      Part 6: Classical Track Artist


The Album Artist stored in MusicBrainz replicates what is written on the spine or front of the disc.This represents the the main people that the release is credited to. 

For Pop/Rock this is quite straight forward, usually a single performer or band is credited for the release as a whole and all the tracks, with perhaps an additional performer credited on a couple of tracks.

For Classical music its more complex since first of all more people are involved such as composers, conductors, performers and orchestras. Secondly these people are not all involved in all tracks, certainly when multiple works by different composers exist on a single album

The Album Artist can be used as a way to correctly identify a release, allowing us to differentiate between different releases with the same or similar names. But for Album Artist to work correctly with MinimServer it must use a single field for the albumArtists rather than one per album artist

e.g
 
ALBUMARTIST= Dallas Wind Symphony, Frederick Fennell
 
instead of  

ALBUMARTIST= Dallas Wind Symphony
ALBUMARTIST= Frederick Fennell


Album Artist is automatically configured for MinimServer, we just need to add sorting.

But we can also browse by the individual album artists as we do for track artists by adding an additional Album_Artists index

Then we can configure as follows

Add Album_artists to indexTags 
Add albumartistsort & album_artists_sort to itemTags
Add albumartist.value.sort={albumartistsort}, album_artists.value.sort={album_artists_sort} to TagValue






This leaves the Artist index as the default configuration, this is useful for differentiating between similarly named albums. 

It then adds a Album_Artists index that lets us browse by the individuals credited on the release and is useful for viewing all releases that they were a principal person or group.

Composer in Album Artist

The other thing to consider is if we want the composers to be part of the album artist fields since they may not be actively involved in the actual performance. We can easily strip these out with SongKong using the Remove Composer from Album Artist option