We would also like track artists to deal with multiple artists. Unlike the albumartist field we don’t have the MinimServer restriction that the artist field must always be a single value.
We can use the aliasTags field to make MinimServer see a particular tag as if it is another tag, we do this using the format actualFieldName:-mappedToFieldName
e.g
aliasTags:Artists:-Artist
So now every occurrence of the multi value Artists field in a file is mapped to the Artist field. It also has the advantage that if we have files that have an Artist field but not an Artists field then the Artist field will be used instead. But please note the minus sign after the colon, this means that Artist field will only be used for the file if there is no Artists field, without the minus both Artists and Artist field would be added.
Then we should rename the confusingly named All Artists index since this uses the value of Artist field (and now Artists field) but that mapping is not actually shown in the properties file.Instead simply use the rename mechanism to rename the All Artists index to Artists index.
e.g
aliasTags:Artists:-Artist
indexTags:All Artists:Artists
So with the default we can see that artist such as David Guetta has many featured artists on his Guetta Blaster album and hence we see David Guetta repeated many times with different featured artists which is messy
After making the described changes
aliasTags:Artists:-Artist
indexTags:All Artists:Artists
it is much clearer, we now see David Guetta only once
But we can still see the collaborations when we go to play the album, all the artists are shown for each track.
However one small disadvantage is because we use Artists field in preference to Artist field we do lose the joining words so it may say simply David Guetta, ChrisWillis whereas originally it said David Guetta feat. Chris Willis
e.g this is how it looks before the changes
Alternative Method
Another way we could do this is the AlbumArtists approach we did in previous tutorial, so we leave the Artist field alone and instead have an Artists index that uses Artists field (or Artist field if Artists field is missing)
indexTags:Artists
tagValue:Artists.default={Artist}
This works, the only trouble with this approach is now MinimServer does not recognize Artists as containing Artist objects it just sees them a generic uPnP object.
We can see this more clearly if set indexArtwork=none and navigate to Artist index they are shown as folders
whereas with original solution they show people icon
And this has an effect if using uPnP search within your Control Point, however most control points search function is a local search not a uPnP search so unlikely to be a problem for most users.