Is there a way to disambiguate composers via tagging, in much the same way as MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID does for track and album artists?
The scenario I’m trying to manage is having one or more namesakes not being incorrectly attributed. As an example Jack Hammer and Jack Hammer where the former has a few albums in my library and the latter has composed tracks that appear elsewhere in my library.
Hi, not currently, its not a field in MUSICBRAINZ itself, but I have considered adding such a thing please see https://jthink.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/SONGKONG/issues/SONGKONG-2328 and https://jthink.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/SONGKONG/issues/SONGKONG-2008
Thanks. It’s rather surprising that the Musicbrainz data model doesn’t incorporate a UUID tag for composers. I get that it all resolves back to the same Artists table in their schema, but nevertheless given the propensity for namesakes one would think it’d have been there as a tag written by Picard from the outset.
As you say all composers are artists so in the MusicBrainz database itself there is no requirement of COMPOSER_ID. There are alot issues trying to use Picard for Classical music, so this is just one issue.
The problem comes in that it becomes nigh on impossible for music playback/library management software to distinguish one composer from another without such a tag being written or some other convoluted logic being applied to try and disambiguate through other contextul metadata.
Now even if we have COMPOSER_ID that isn’t going to help the casual user that much, and isnt that helpful for the music software because you need a player that understands MusicBrainz, and you need all your music to be tagged to MusicBrainz for it to work well.
I think a better solution maybe that SongKong knows who the underlying artist/composer is so if you run SongKong over complete library it could identify when you have multiple composers with same name and then make some adjustment one of the multiple names so yo can identify them. We could do this for artists as well as composers.
Given MusicBrainz and Discogs are the only publicly available music database (I’m discounting Rym because it has no API) I don’t feel there’s really a choice but to try to adopt some standards and build that into software rather than continue to compensate.
If I were writing my own player it’d be a simple SQL query to add the artist UUID to a COMPOSER_ID for every track that has a composer entry.
Okay, but are you going to write your own player, if not how is SongKong storing COMPOSER_IDs going to help you ?
I may ultimately embark on that road because most music players do a terrible job of leveraging metadata or even thinking through a decent data model that enables a rich, data driven user experience. Most don’t even leverage what metadata is relatively readily available. That disambiguation hasn’t been anticipated and catered for is itself a clear indication of fundamentally poor thinking when it comes to a data model for getting the basics of music exploration sorted. That’s not a SongKong problem, it’s a problem with MusicBrainz, Discogs and most/all apps, even Roon.
I wish there was a way to standardize the spelling/naming of composers, particularly in classical music (e.g., Joseph Haydn vs. Franz Joseph Haydn).
If you were elected to set the rules to standardize composer names what would your standard be ?