Artists vs Album Artists Tag

[pjg61]

I am a new RS150B owner, switched from a BlueSound Node and I noticed one particular problem with the way that the RS150B reads the ID3 tags from my local music.

Rose is using the ‘Artist’ tag and the problem with this is that IF you have plenty of compilation albums, you end up with a large collection of Artists when you browse your music. Since each song in a compilation album is from a different Artist, all these single songs end up as Artists…

The BlueSound products read the ‘Album Artist’ tag which keeps the list of Artists very clean. When you play compilation albums (Ex: Best of the 70s), you will always search by Album and not Artist. Therefore, using Album Artist is a far better choice as the tag.

I would (humbly) suggest the following change

A) Have an option in the Settings to either use the Artist tag or Album Artist tag when reading local music files

OR

B) Add a new category under Classification for ‘Album Artist’

Thanks

[Jeep]

I totally agree! The artist tag is totally useless.

What is usually done is use the ‘album artist’ tag. And if that is empty use ‘artist’.

[StandardModel]

I totally agree.

StandardModel

[the_bat]

100% agreed. It’s probably my single biggest bugbear.

[Ben]

In order to find the music, artist, album what ever, the best solution is to fill in as many tags as possible. I recommend to do it like in the screenshot; This is the same logic as Discogs fills in the fields.

If you have a various artist album enter a “VA” or “Various Artists” in the “album artist” field for all tracks of an album. The algorithm of the ROSE player should then collect/recognise all tracks belonging to an album and set that into a single various artists album.
The individual artists/group/band/ensemble go into the “Artists” field.
The same multiple entries should be made for “Genre” and Composer".

here are some more tag fields to find music:

At the end of the day, if the fields on all albums/tracks are properly tagged with the same logic one can find all kinds of information and play the music collection. It is a lot of work but certainly worth it.

The main issue here is, that the ROSE DB does not find all tags in multi value fields.

[ARey11]

Ben uses the correct mode.

This link gives a clear example.

https://www.discogs.com/release/3043126-Various-Funiculi-Funicula-33

[the_bat]

All true, but it doesn’t help. I have albums tagged that way and Rose doesn’t appear to look at the album artist tag, so in the Classification/Artist view every artist credited on any track is included - which would be OK if there was a separate Album Artist view, but there isn’t. In Album view Artist seems to be selected (randomly as far as I can tell) from the list of individual track credits.

[Ben]

This album is an interesting complex example of what can be tagged and should be used… i think tagging here involves some manual editing. Then perhaps not…

From what i understand is that the ROSE DB does not understand multi value fields because there is no (user) defined separator . This means that the ROSE reads the first entry (from the right, not from the left) of multiple values then stops reading that field.
Hence the listener can not find all tagged entries.
Also there seems to be confusion in ROSE with multiple disks of an album and vinyl side A and B because they are not keept together as one.

[the_bat]

There are two separate issues here - as you say Rose doesn’t recognise field separators, but also it doesn’t look at the Album Artist tag. Both need to be remedied, hopefully in the release later this year when they address the database update issue.

[Ben]

This means that if i tag an album with the band name in the album artist field and the single artists in the artists field i would not find the band name. I did not even realise this yet… i thought that search goes over all available fields.

[Jeep]

Correct that there is no seperator. The semicolon ’ ; ’ is not recognised. Often android taggers read the entire string “artist1; artist1” as artist. I tagged my entire USB HD with Foobar the discogs way. But no music player on Android recognises the ’ ; ’ , so I just truncate it now.
So I doubt it can be fixed other than with an Android OS upgrade. No easy copy paste from any Android app.
Even the Android version of Foobar is useless.

The album artist tag however should be fixable.

[Ben]

I use Media Monkey 4 and a Discogs add on to tag.
Media Monkey understands a user definable multi value separator.
Media Monkey is also a music player for Android… i think it should understand the separator. The default is ; that is why i know about it.

[Jeep]

I just installed Mediamonkey for Android to check but I’m still not seeing seperate Tags with ‘;’ seperator. I copied an album and the genre is shown as “electronic~downtempo~ambient”

So no, I don’t know of any app in Android that adheres to this standard. So I assume it’s a level above app level in Android.

I deinstalled it. It’s useless for me. Nothing to sync without a pc. No tagging. UPnP dlna only payed version. I don’t need any of that.

[Ben]

It will not help you much when i say it works in my setup.
What can is say other than, that it works in my Android which is an older Android 10 Version with the latest Media Monkey.
It separates the multi value fields because of ; and orders them in categories like Genre, Artist.

[ARey11]

Ben,

Last week I had a service done on one of my SSD drives in use
with hi-fi Rose 250.

Although I thought I had a complete optimal music library from last time,
there were still many blank fields.

It became a serious job.

I have used several metadata editors for this reason.
I recommend that you watch these videos where the usefulness of this is well explained.

The user has used MusicBrainz Picard and mp3 tag as a basis.
It is useful for anyone who wants to use the best possible music library.
Other software is just as good as long as it is used correctly.

I think your problem with ; is a general problem.
It is mentioned several times in Android.

What I had already thought about the separator ; replace it with this separator / .
In CSV files the default is ; but there are also other possibilities.

This person had / as a separator instead of ; applied in one of the videos.
There was also an explanation about album artist
Here was just a demo about the difference between artist and album artist.

Other software also shows the usefulness that an album can be composed of
various other albums and/or artists.

It taught me to look for other albums and artists.

[Ben]

Hello ARey11
i work with Media Monkey for many years now. I still use Version 4 for tagging and to “auto organise” the directory structure. From the use of Media Monkey i know that there can be a separator for multi value fields. It is user definable but i left it as it was suggested as a semicolon.

Most important is that the separator is user definable so as to integrate an existing tagged music collection into another one. They both must understand to write and read separator and multi value fields.

The separator must be user definable in ROSE devices as well so that existing tagged tracks can be integrated into the ROSE DB and Applications no matter which tagging application was used.

I think that there can be problems with individual separators because they are used for programming and are different for Windows and Linux/Android.

By the way, Picard has an Android add on with which one can scan the bar code of an album and transfer that via WiFi to the windows computer into Picard tag editor. I have not tried it yet.

[Ben]

after i tagged the tracks… i also use a feature “auto organise” with which i can create a directory and file naming structure out of the tags with user defined variables. I use different naming convention for album (single and multi artists), various artist album, classical music with 1 composer and multiple composers.
Finally the file system of Windows only allows for a maximum lenght of 255 caracters.

It looks like this…

So proper tagging is important for this as well.

[Bourdeau]

Complètement d’accord, c’est le principal problème (pour moi) de gestion de la base de données audio du RS250A. Toute ma base de données a été faite à partir d’un Cocktail Audio X50D qui gérait correctement les “tag” et avec lequel je n’ai aucun problème de classement avec ma base de données actuelle.
Les Disques durs on été recopiés ensuite et insérés dans le RS250A avec les problèmes que vous soulevez: un nombre d’artistes énorme apparait dans le ROSE qui ne sont pas l’ Artiste de l’album mais de certains auteurs des morceaux de l’album, ce qui rend difficile les recherches dans le RS 250A.
J’ai plus de 4000 albums dans mes DDurs il est hors de question de revoir les “tags” de chaque album.
A mon avis il doit être possible de corriger ces problèmes dans le RS250A.