But with SongKong we properly support multiple artists so in the case of an album by multiple artists the Album Artist field stores them as a single field, but the Album Artists field store each artist as an individual field
e.g.
Album Artist:
Johnny Cash & June Carter
Album Artists:
Johnny Cash
June Carter
So if we use the Album Artists field we can see all albums by Johnny Cash under one entry, both the albums where they are the single album artist and the albums where they are one of a number of albums artists. This is much neater, especially for popular artists who may have been involved with many collaborations
Because the SongKong field Album Artists actually maps to Album_Artists for all audio formats we need to use Album_Artists rather than Album Artists. But we can use MinimServers rename syntax so the index name displays as Album Artists by using the form fieldName:displayName. So if we modify the configuration to remove Artist index and instead add:
indexTags:Album_artists:Album Artists
and then if we view the results in our Control Point we go from:
to
i.e for the album Bridges by Gil Scott Heron and Brian Jackson we can now navigate to it from either of the album artists, and we can also see all their albums under their name so all of our Gil Scott Heron albums are listed under his album artist entry regardless of if he was the only album artist for the album or part of a collaboration.
Also notice that when you play the album because we have not modified AlbumArtist field it still show the AlbumArtist value (Gil Scott Heron & Brian Jackson) rather than concatentating the AlbumArtists values (Gil Scott Heron, Brian Jackson)
Now SongKong automatically adds to the Album Artists field if the album if identified, but if the album cannot be identified by SongKong then this field is likely to be blank. But there is a good chance that Album Artist field will have a value because it is a standard field and may have been entered when album was first ripped on downloaded.
So we would like to use AlbumArtist if the Album Artists is missing. But one important thing to note is that the AlbumArtist field is also used by MinimServer to identify albums. And for this to work correctly the value of AlbumArtist must be the same for each track on a particular Album and can only contain a single value.
So we must not do anything to change the value of AlbumArtist to break that, for example if we used aliasTags to map album_artists to albumArtist that would break album grouping.
But instead we can make use of the tagValue default attribute. If we add the following then when Album_artists field is missing MinimServer will check the AlbumArtist field and if that exists use that instead.
tagValue:Album_Artists.default={AlbumArtist}
So the total solution is:
indexTags:Album_artists:Album Artists
tagValue:Album_Artists.default={AlbumArtist}