In the context of Classical music the Track Artist only really exists as a concept in digital music. On an album various different people can be involved in each track, they may be a soloist, part of an ensemble, orchestra or choir or the conductor and labelled as such, different tracks have different types of people involved. The Track Artist represents the most important people or groups involved in the performance.
The Track Artist is used in MinimServer in the All Artists index
There is no hard and fast rule about what the Track Artist should be. But SongKong lets you configure what fields to use using the MusicBrainz Track Artist option on the Classical tab. The default is Performers and Choir/Orchestra/Ensemble and Conductor - note the Composer is not included since they are not actually involved in the performance.
The conductor is involved in the performance, but since the conductor has their own standard conductor field you may decide not to add it to the track artist field.
There is also the option that just takes the first most important person/group Performers or Ensemble/Choir/Orchestra or Composer . This is quite useful if you just want to present a simpler value to MinimServer’s All Artist index.
If you change your mind just change the option and rerun SongKong over your files to quickly update with the new values. Because the songs have already been identified SongKong does not have to rematch the files only update the metadata from the matched release.
SongKong does write all the individuals and groups to different fields as well so you can easily configure MinimServer to index performers, ensembles, choirs and orchestras as well. In fact, you may prefer not to include the All Artists index at all and just index the different types of people and group that can be included in the Track Artist field
For example you could add the following:
indexTags:Choir, Conductor, Ensemble, Orchestra, Performer_name:Performer
itemTags:choir_sort, conductor_sort,ensemble_sort, orchestra_sort, performer_name_sort
tagValue:Choir.value.sort={choir_sort}, Conductor.value.sort={conductor_sort},Ensemble.value.sort={ensemble_sort}, Orchestra.value.sort={orchestra_sort},Performer_name.value.sort={performer_name_sort}
Performer
Note we use the Performer_name field instead of the Performer field since the Performer also includes instrument. But we rename the field to Performer using the OriginalName : NewName syntax so more user friendly. When configuring it’s sort value in the tagValue field we have to refer it to by its original name ( Performer_Name ) rather than its new name ( Performer ).
indexTags:Performer_name:Performer
itemtags:Performer_name_sort
tagValue:Performer_name.value.sort={Performer_name_sort}
