By default MinimServer adds the Artist and the All Artists indexes, but what actually are they?
The Artist index actually contains the album artist by default but the track artist if it is missing. Whereas the All Artists index only ever contains the track artist.
This is rather confusing since Artist index is not only mixing up album artists and track artists but the name of the index implies it is using the artist metadata field (which is the track artist) rather than the album artist field which is what it is actually primarily using.
The All Artists index is simply an index by the track artist, since all indexes store all values it doesn’t make any sense that All has been added to the index name, for example the Date index stores all dates and the Composer index stores all composers.
Also the mapping of album artist (albumartist field) and then track artist (artist field) to the Artist index is done within the MinimServer code it is not clearly defined in the properties. And the mapping of the track artist (artist field) to the All Artists indexes is not defined either. This can make it more difficult when we want to modify the artists mappings.
In the past some users only added album artist to their metadata fields if it was different to the track artist to save space. But the space saved was negligible and then if the album artist is missing it is unclear if it is actually the same as track artist or just unknown so it makes no sense to do this. SongKong always adds the album artist if the album is identified.
So a simple improvement is to remove the Artist index, and replace it with an index based only on the Album Artist. Although displayed in SongKong as Album Artist it maps internally to AlbumArtist for Flac, and this is also the meta meta field used by MinimServer for mapping other formats so we need to use AlbumArtist and then can use the rename function so displays more nicely.
indexTags=AlbumArtist:Album Artists, Date, Genre, All Artists, Composer, *RecentAdded, *RecentPlayed, #AudioData, #AudioFormat, Work,Orchestra,Conductor,Ensemble,Performer,Choir