MinimServer with SongKong: Part 6: Configuring the Track Artist for Classical music

Go forward to Part 7:Album Artist

Go back to      Part 5:The Artist index

 

The Track Artist 

In the context of Classical music the Track Artist only really exists as a concept in digital music. On a CD or record various different people can be involved in each track, they may be a soloist, part of an ensemble, orchestra or choir or the conductor and labelled as such, different tracks have different types of people involved. The Track Artist represents the most important people or groups involved in the performance.

The Track Artist is used in MinimServer in the All Artists index, it is only used in the Artists index when the album artist is missing.

There is no hard and fast rule about what the Track Artist should be. But SongKong lets you configure what fields to use using the MusicBrainz Track Artist option on the Classical tab. The default is Performers and Choir/Orchestra/Ensemble and Conductor - note the Composer is not included since they are not actually involved in the performance.

The conductor is involved in the performance, but since the conductor has their own standard conductor field you may decide not to add it to the track artist field.

There is also the option that just takes the first most important person/group Performers or Ensemble/Choir/Orchestra or Composer. This is quite useful if you just want to present a simpler value to MinimServer's All Artist index.


If you change your mind just change the option and rerun SongKong over your files to quickly update with the new values. Because the songs have already been identified SongKong does not have to rematch the files only update the metadata from the matched release.

SongKong does write all the individuals and groups to different fields as well so you can easily configure MinimServer to index performers, ensembles, choirs and orchestras as well. In fact, you may prefer not to include the All Artists index at all and just index the different types of people and group that can be included in the Track Artist field

Within MinimServer you would want to add the following

indexTags:Choir, Conductor, Ensemble, Orchestra, Performer_name:Performer

itemTags:choir_sort, conductor_sort,ensemble_sort, orchestra_sort, performer_name_sort

tagValue:Choir.value.sort={choir_sort}, Conductor.value.sort={conductor_sort},Ensemble.value.sort={ensemble_sort},Orchestra.value.sort={orchestra_sort},Performer_name.value.sort={performer_name_sort}

Note we use the Performer_name field instead of the Performer field since the Performer also includes instrument. But we rename the field to Performer using the OriginalName:NewName syntax so more user friendly. When configuring it's sort value in the tagValue field we have to refer it to by its original name (Performer_Name) rather than its new name (Performer).

 



Next time we look at the Album Artist

MinimServer with SongKong: Part 5: The All Artist Index

Go forward to Part 6: Classical Track Artist
Go back to     Part 4: Groups and Works

 

The All Artist Index

Standard audio file metadata has two artist fields, artist and albumArtist. The albumArtist should be the same for all tracks on the release, the artist relates to the track and can therefore be different for each track.

By default MinimServer configures an All Artist index that indexes the (track) artist field, and a Artist index that contains just the albumArtist unless that is missing in which case the (track) artist is used instead.

Multiple Track Artists

Often a track is credited to multiple artists.  Because many applications such as iTunes do not understand multiple values in these fields SongKong stores multiple people as one value in the artist field. But then stores the individual people in corresponding multi value field artists

MinimServer does understand multiple values so its best to configure it to use these fields rather than the default. 


We do this by mapping artists to artist. We use the - syntax for two reasons, it means we do not end up with duplication since we never want to add the artists and the artist value to the index. It also means that for songs without an artists field but with an artist field that the data in the artist field will be added. This is important since although SongKong will add both fields for every song matched there are likely to be some songs that SongKong could not identify, and these many have a standard artist field but not an artists field.

i.e aliasTags:artists:-artist

We probably want to sort artists by their sort names as well. SongKong provides special sort fields that work with the multiple value artist fields called artists_sort so lets add this in as well using the same method we used for composer and conductor sort 

i.e.
 itemTags:artist_sort
 tagValue:artist.value.sort={artists_sort}

This gives us:

Now when we browse Artists index we go from

to

Notice that in the first screenshot we have Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Edwardo Mata but in the second screenshot we have Dallas Symphony Orchestra on its own, Eduardo Mata is also listed alone (under M).

The advantage of this is you can now easily browse all the releases that Dallas Symphony Orchestra are involved in regardless of other artists involved.

A warning about Album Artist

SongKong also has AlbumArtists and AlbumArtistsSort and we could apply the same logic to the AlbumArtist field in MinimServer. However having multiple value album artists in MinimServer breaks its album logic so it is best to stick with the defaults and add a different index if you want to see album artists as individual artists, this is detailed in this blog post

 

What is a Classical Artist ?

We have seen how to deal with multiple artist credits, but what should the artist and album artist actually include: soloists, performers, orchestras, conductors or composers ? 

We discuss this more in the next post.

Discogs Artists that could be linked to MusicBrainz Artists Report

Within MusicBrainz it is possible to link an artist to the equivalent Discogs artist, in fact there are already some 300,000 artists linked. However there are nearly a million artists within MusicBrainz leaving nearly 700,000 artists unlinked, the majority of these already existing in Discogs.

Linking both artists together allow information between the two databases to be shared, for example the Discogs artist may contain the real name of the artist and that might be missing from the equivalent MusicBrainz artist aliases. Alternatively MusicBrainz may have various translations of an artists names for different languages, and these variations may not be available in Discogs.

Albunack now contains a number of reports that attempt to find potential matches between the two together with a link for each match to make it easy to add a link from MusicBrainz artist to the Discogs artist, all listed here

The first report  MB artist matches Discogs artist and both have a release with same name and the artist names are unique contains over 40,000 potential links. Matches are only listed here if the following criteria are met:

• Simplified MusicBrainz artist is unique within MusicBrainz list of artists.
• Smplified Discogs artist name is unique within Discogs link of artists.
• Neither name is already matched
• Both the MB artist and the Discogs artist have released an album with the same name

Because of these conditions we are confident there are very few (if any at all) bad links.

The simplified artist names remove case, accents and some punctuation in order to allow matches between artist names that are not identical. Because we only include artists whose simplified name is unique within the databases it is unlikely that the MusicBrainz artist has linked to the wrong Discogs artist. And this is made very unlikely with the last condition that requires both artists to have a release with the same name.

Some of the links may already have already been created because the underlying database is not updated in real time, but it is regularly updated - usually every week.

Links are listed so that artists with the most releases are listed first, the basis being that these are likely to be of most interest.

But with 40,000 artists to link the job to complete this task could take some time, so if you have 10 minutes please consider double-checking and then creating some of these links within MusicBrainz.

Why does the Artist column in Jaikoz Column Browser not match the values of my artists ?

Today a customer asked why even though they had modified the artist field of some of their songs that Jaikoz still shows the old artists names in the column browser, even after removing the sort artist and sort album artist fields.

The culprit is the artists field, Jaikoz uses the artists field in preference to the artist field for the Column Browser if the artists field is not empty. The artists field is only used by Jaikoz and SongKong currently but other applications are looking at incorporating it. It only differs when a song is attributed to multiple artists. In this case each artist is added separately to the artists field allowing you to search for a song by just the first (main artist) involved in the song.

i.e 'Jackson' by 'Johnny Cash & June Carter'

ARTIST:JohnnyCash & June Carter
ARTISTS[0]:Johnny Cash
ARTISTS[1]:June Carter

So the column browser would have one entry in the artist column containing 'Johnny Cash', but if you delete the artists field you'll then have one entry showing the artists concatenated together as 'Johnny Cash & June Carter' so it is then harder to list all the songs involving Johnny Cash

Now actually when the artists field is intact we want June Carter to be listed as well in the Column Browser but that is not yet done, see http://jthink.net:8081/browse/JAIKOZ-783