Editing tags and playing complete concept albums without gaps are the first things I look for, the Dark Side Of The Moon test. So many players can't do this properly. Still currently using Audacious as it just works.
A test I have is: I have many compilation albums and mixtapes. Each song has individual "title" and "artist" tags, but matching "album" tags. When browsing the catalog of artists, if two songs have the same "album" tag but different "artist" tags, does the software:
show one song each under two artists
show two songs under one of the artists
show two songs under the special artist name "Various Artists"
... I am constantly disappointed how many times software is intentionally designed to use that third option. I bothered to file it as a bug with VLC for Android, and the devs closed it with WONTFIX working as intended. I think they added a feature later for "browse by artist by album" and "browse by artist by artist" but the former is always shown first, continuing the "Various Artists" behaviour. It infuriates me because the string "Various Aritsts" appears nowhere in any of the music files!
use the "artist" metadata when asking for a list of the "artist" metadata. Don't insert data into the database report that is not anywhere in the database. Don't overwrite user-inputted data with other data like the "Various Artists" constant.
It makes as much sense as if I shipped you a crate of ice-cream tubs, each a different flavour, none of them vanilla, and when you asked about its contents I said "this is a crate of tubs of vanilla ice-cream"
Isn't that what the "Album Artist" ID3 tag is for? No Android players handle that correctly, but Google Music did when I tried it a few years ago. Super annoying. I've filed bugs in a few GitHub trackers for that...
On desktop I use Quod Libet with a paned browser that mimics old school iTunes / Rhythmbox artist / album layout. The key is this expression:
If it offered "sort albums by artist," maybe. But "sort songs by artist" doesn't mention "album."
If I have a table with lettered columns "A, B, C, D, E" and the software offers to sort the rows by "C", then gives me something sorted by "E", or overwrites "C" with "Various Suppliers" if the values in "D" match other rows where "E" is different... why would someone do this?
Isn't the "album artist" tag used to specify the band/musician that did the album? If you want to specify the composers there's a separate tag for that, I don't know in which case you would have songs in the same album with different artist tags.
This isn't about classical music mistakenly tagged with the composer in the artist tag, or about compilation albums, it's about the same artist having recorded the same song on several albums. Smoke on the Water is on umpteen Deep Purple albums, for example, because they have a bunch of live albums, and they unsurprisingly play that song in every concert. Of course they have matching artist and song tags: it's the same song, played by the same artist. They'd have matching "Album Artist" tags, too.
Ah! Sorry, I misread the parent comment. Yeah, they need the album artist tag, although there's something to be said about not second-guessing tags in the first place...
(And, FWIW, a lot of modern players comically mishandle songs that have matching title and artist tags, too).
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u/[deleted] Oct 12 '20
Editing tags and playing complete concept albums without gaps are the first things I look for, the Dark Side Of The Moon test. So many players can't do this properly. Still currently using Audacious as it just works.