Artist metadata oddness - Album Artist and track artist fields

Answered
Gchaltas

I've finally figured out an odd behavior in the "Artist" sort in the Bluesound controller.   As documented, it shows and sorts by the "Album Artist" metadata field, but that's not quite the behavior I see.  Here's what I see:

1. It makes an "Artist" list from all all Album Artist entries.
2. It looks through the Track Artist fields as well, and if a known Album Artist appears there it adds them to the "Artist" list.

I like this - so, for example, as long as I have one album with "Vienna Philharmonic" in the Album Artist field, all my albums with Vienna Philharmonic in either the "Album Artist" or per-track "Artist" field will end up the Bluesound controller's "Artists" list.

However, if an artist is only listed in the per-track "Artists" metadata, it will not appear in the controller's "Artists" list.     So in my case I have lots of entries in the "Artists" list for Vienna Philharmonic, but none for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra even though I have many albums by both - all my Cleveland albums list composers as the Album Artist (maybe that's a mistake?)

I'm not sure what the correct behavior should be here - but I think my preference would be for the "Artists" list to merge both the Album Artists and the per-track Artists.  That said, I suppose that list could quickly become unwieldy in a large collection with poorly curated per-track Artists fields.

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3 comments

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  • Official comment
    Tony W.
    Product Support Manager

    Thanks for the feedback

    This is exactly how AlbumArtist and Artist tags are supposed to work.

    I will add when you search by Artist, BluOS returns results from both fields.

  • Gchaltas

    Tony - I'm confused.  Are you saying that my description is accurate - and that the per-track Artist entries are only listed if the same artist appears in at least one Album Artist entry?     If so, would you explain why that's the intended behavior?   I'm fully willing to accept that I'm not really using the various fields optimally for classical music, so understanding how you (Bluesound) expect them to be used would be helpful to me.

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  • Tony W.
    Product Support Manager

    I am saying;

    • When you select Artist View, the results are based solely on the AlbumArtist Tag
    • When you search, you get results based on the AlbumrArtist tag and the Artist Tag

    If the AlbumArtist Tag is blank,. we will review a combination of the Artist Tag and Album Tag to build albums in Artist view. This is the intended, by-the-book interpretation of ID3 Metatags.

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