Using a delimiter when adding multiple artist names to column

[Optimal-Procedure885]

I use Lyrion as my music server. It’s highly metadata aware and driven in terms of its UI, so the richer the metadata the more immersive the experience, and the richer the ways in which one can navigate your music collection. As a result whenever I tag music with multiple artists contributing on a track or collaborating on a jointly billed album I write each artist’s name as a distinct tag, like so:

I’m looking at the changes SK would make to my metadata.From what I see it would transform the above-mentioned into the following:

From the screenshot of the spreadsheet it’s clear that SK would replace my two distinct artist and albumartist tags and replace it with artist=“Aerosmith & YUNGBLUD” and albumartist=“Aerosmith & YUNGBLUD”. It’d do the same with 38 Special & Train, replacing artist=“38 Special” and artist=“Train” with artist=“38 Special & Train”.

This would cause Lyrion to create two new new contributors called “Aerosmith & YUNGBLUD” and “38 Special & Train” respectively. The end result of this is that I would not be able to navigate from Aerosmith & YUNGBLUD to either Aerosmith or YUNGBLUD and visa versa and that release will not appear under either artist, appearing only as a release by albumartist “Aerosmith & YUNGBLUD”.

The same would be the case with “38 Special & Train” - I would not be able to navigate to either entity from this track.

Not sure whether or not there’s an option I overlooked, but seeing as SK clearly knows in both instances that we are talking about distinct persons/performers/artists (the “MB Artist Id” and “MB Release Artist Id” carry multiple mbid’s where appropriate), is there an option to have SK delimit rather than combine the artist names .e.g “Aerosmith;YUNGBLUD” and “38 Special;Train” instead of “Aerosmith & YUNGBLUD” and “38 Special & Train” respectively?

Without that option SK would do more harm than good to how things show up in Lyrion (and probably most music servers that don’t to their own metadata mastering like a certain server that shall remain unnamed…).

I’ve not raised the differing representation of YUNGBLUD vs Yungblud because I raised it elsewhere when discussing canonical names.

[paultaylor]

So what SongKong does by default is store the artist and albumartist as a list of separate artists in the artists and albumartists fields (note the plural), and store as a single value with conjunctive words in the artist and albumartist fields, it does this because:

1. Many music players dont understand multiple values so if you stored as multiple values in artist and albumartist field your music player might just show the first artist
2. The list view does lose the conjunctives so now you dont know if the artists were credited as Aerosmith & YUNGBLUD or Aerosmith with YUNGBLUD or Aerosmith featuring YUNGBLUD ecetera.

As you can see here:

But for music players that do understand multiple values it is otten better to display as muliple values, and you can do this easily by adding the values to the Save multiple values as separate fields option on the Save tab (this done mean you lose the conjunctives though)

Also, worth noting if there is any field that you don’t want SongKong to modify the you can just use the Never modify or add these fields option on the Format tab.

e.g configured to never modify Album Artist field