Artist and Artist Id fields in Musicbrainz NGS

[paultaylor]

Currently with Musicbrainz any release is just credited to one artist, even if in reality it is two artists. For example ‘Jackson’ is credited to ‘Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash’ , and within Musicbrainz there is an artist called ‘Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash’ ( as well as one called ‘Johnny Cash’, one called ‘June Carter Cash’)

But within Musicbrainz NGS there is the concept of artist credits so the the song is credited to two distinct artists ‘Johnny Cash’ and ‘June Carter Cash’ each with their own id, and the ‘Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash’ artist is no longer needed. Also the artist credit name on a particular release can be different the the artist name so the credit could be ‘June Cater’ rather than ‘June Carter Cash’.

So how should we model this in Jaikoz ?

We could store multiple artist ids and artist names, (there is a problem is that ID3 v23 doesnt offically support null seperated fields but this what we do for genres without any problems so far)

More problematic is most applications (such as iTunes) dont support multiple artist fields and will only show the first one, so in this example you’ll never see “June Carter”

And also if we only store the artist names we dont see the connecters. For example if we just store “Johnny Cash”, “June Carter” we dont know if it is “Johnny Cash & June Cater”, “Johnny Cash with June Carter” or something else.

So the proposal is to store multiple ids in the MB Artist Id field, keep the artist field as it is, and store seperate artists in a new field. Possibly something compatible with JRivers Media Centre that does something like this.

Any comments ?

[asc3nti0n]

The crediting a song to multiple unique artists I have always felt iTunes should move down this path itself!

The interface?
Base it on the Facebook private message window… start typing an artist and it starts to complete the artists name, once finished it appears in a translucent bubble all on it’s own, locked in. The auto-complete sourced from a list of the current artists in the loaded playlist? or a master playlist?, and this list would increasingly become more concise as Jaikoz culls the “xxxx & yyyy” from the master once they no longer exist in the iTunes DB?.

Any chance there can be several levels of creditted works?
[list]xxxx & yyyy & zzzz, [/list]
[list]xxxx vs. yyyy, [/list]
[list]xxxx ft. yyyy & zzzz, [/list]
[list]xxxx covering yyyy (where yyyy may be searched for as ‘original artist’)?[/list]

This should be controlled this way in Jaikoz so that a single ‘artist’ can be sent back to iTunes stored in the simple-text format that presents.
An option for iTunes’ “Album Artist” and “Sorting Artist” to be filled by either xxxx, or yyyy etc. may be of use to some.

Futher to this concept:

Once we manage the multi-linking of a track to multiple artists, then it would be simple continuation to manage a single “track” to muliple versions of that track… so three live versions from around the world, muliple remixes of the same base track,
So basically apply the same multiplicity of the field “artist” to the “track title” field.

If iTunes were then to suppose it: Genius/Smart Playlists that select the “live” versions of tracks in “My Top Rated” playlist etc. or select the Most Played: “remix” . etc. would be awesome!

This all sounds a bit big for Jaikoz
Jaikoz doesn’t have a database to mirror the iTunes DB though. semi-competitor, but definitely complementary opposition mp3 package: tagtraums’ “beaTunes” already maintains its’ own database, and I love Jaikoz because it only works on the open track(s) at the time. No overheads for maintaining synchronism of two databases. The ‘features’ above have been racing around in my head for a while, and basically are aimed at the main iTunes DB, but if any part of it can be approached by Jaikoz’s feature set, go for it!

[paultaylor]

Hi asc3nti0n,

I can tell you’ve hads this idea for a while, but do you have any views on how the multiple artists should actuallly be stored in your files ?

I was thinking about this in the context of autocorrection from Musicbrainz rather than you manually entering it. I guess that is something that needs to be considered as well but not sure if your idea fits in with Jaikoz, Jaikoz is trys to explicitly show you the fields a song has and let you you edit them directly, so im stilll thinking that artist and artists are seperate fields that should be edited seperately. Having said that it does seem silly for the two not to reflect each other.

I dont think you want to see your track marked with different versions of the track that you havent physically got. However I did think about linking a track to all the releases that your version belongs to. This could be done like the current genre field so that most players would just see the first release but more advanced ones could see all releases. However the majority of users probably just want to see the releases that represent the releases they have rather than seeing all releases the track could appear on. So this idea is very much ‘blue sky’ at the moment.

Jaikoz is very much a tag editor not a music player, so any of these features are not much use if players cannot take advantage of them.

[asc3nti0n]

OK, so to deal with the question at hand: How do we store multiple-artists within the audio file?
[list]Separate field in Jaikoz, Agree entirely.[/list]
[list]Auto-Correct (cntl-1) item to concatenate artists to artist … that’d be good.[/list]
[list]Delimiters/key-characters/text to throw in amongst artists selections to give the options of ft. or vs. or covering. etc.??? awesome[/list]

But the artists, they’ll be primarily coming down from Musicbrainz NGS? So if we were to alter the order of the multi-credits and throw in delimiters if they require it, will that break if we re-scan the track across the Musicbrainz NGS lookup code?
Or can the lookup go:

Depending on how Musicbrainz NGS sends you the information of course, whether the separate artists can be handled objectively like that.

Good Luck, input from other users would be nice, jump in people!!! Better than Paul just designing a feature for me and him

(I learnt two years of a four year computer science degree, based around C++ code, no GUI stuff, just code. A decade on, I now only program in pseudocode, I don’t know the code detail, I just know how concepts can go together)