Online Music Library Integration (Tidal) and Album Artists

[mvordeme]

Hi there,

I like the idea of scanning the online library only once and adding everything to the library, but in my case, it all ends up in a big mess. What is supposed to happen, anyway? It looks like

• favourite tracks are dropped,
• favourite albums end up directly in the album list of an artist,
• favourite artists get a special "browse on Tidal" menu pick,
• favourite playlists end up in playlists.

Right now, I have three problems with that:

• All contributing artists of a favourite album are added to the album artists list. For example "Chess (The Original Recording)" adds a host of new album artists although it should just be listed under "Various Artists".
• The sorting of the artists differs from the sorting in my local library. I have tagged all tracks with "albumartistsort" (= last name, first name), so the online library creates duplicate entries. This can probably not be fixed entirely, but one could attempt to match at least existing artists from the local library.
• The library view containing only local music still lists all the online content.

There is probably more, but I haven't given this much time, yet. Right now, the collection is too confusing to reveal any details.

[mherger]

> - All contributing artists of a favourite album are added to the album
> artists list. For example "Chess (The Original Recording)" adds a host
> of new album artists although it should just be listed under "Various
> Artists".

There indeed is some room for improvement. TIDAL actually has a label of
"main artist" in the data, and album vs. track artists. I should be able
to improve this.

> - The sorting of the artists differs from the sorting in my local
> library. I have tagged all tracks with "albumartistsort" (= last name,
> first name), so the online library creates duplicate entries. This can
> probably not be fixed entirely, but one could attempt to match at
> least existing artists from the local library.

"attempt to match" is asking for complaints. Because it'll never be
perfect. It will always fail for some. How would you split "Lady
Gaga/Ariana Grande" correctly? Or from your example "London Symphony
Orchestra"?

> - The library view containing only local music still lists all the
> online content.

That would be a bug. I'll look into this. Thanks!

--

Michael

[mvordeme]

Thanks for looking into this. As I said, I did not spend much time trying to understand what happened, so let me know if I can check things to help.

"attempt to match" is asking for complaints. Because it'll never be perfect. It will always fail for some. How would you split "Lady Gaga/Ariana Grande" correctly? Or from your example "London Symphony Orchestra"?

I see your point. On second thoughts, the task might be a lot easier for album artists only. My idea was to simply look for an exact match. Assume that I own an album by "The Beatles" which I have given the albumartistsort tag "Beatles, The" (actually from MusicBrainz). If there is more Beatles content in the online library, you could try to match the albumartist in my local library and merge the content retaining the local sort order. Just exact matches, no complicated algorithms. But I agree that it will never be pretty.

[mherger]

> Thanks for looking into this. As I said, I did not spend much time
> trying to understand what happened, so let me know if I can check things
> to help.

Would you mind sharing your library.db with me?

https://www.dropbox.com/request/T3RctyzGgNg0oFDubq6a

--

Michael

[mvordeme]

Uploaded.

I just noticed that Album Artists don't work quite like I would expect them to, anyway. Apart from online music, only album artists are listed, but under each of them, you will find albums to which they contributed along with their genuine albums. For example, under Johann Sebastian Bach, you find The Four Lute Suites along with two Various Artists releases (I need to fix that Emilie Autumn album ...). It kind of looks intentional because those albums are filtered views (with no obvious way to navigate to the full albums).

[mvordeme]

This looks very neat, indeed. Thanks a lot. Now I can see where my own tags need fixing.

[mvordeme]

There is one more odd thing about case sensitivity. If my spelling of an artist name differs from Tidal's only in case (e.g. ABBA or Stream of Passion), the LMS creates two different Artist entries for it, but the "Browse on Tidal" menu pick will come up with the same results for the two. So will Deezer's smart radio. Maybe the LMS's matching of artist names should be case insensitive for a more consistent result. (And yes, I'd like my spelling to take precedence over Tidal's.)

[mherger]

> There is one more odd thing about case sensitivity. If my spelling of an
> artist name differs from Tidal's only in case (e.g. ABBA or Stream of
> Passion), the LMS creates two different Artist entries for it, but the
> "Browse on Tidal" menu pick will come up with the same results for the
> two. So will Deezer's smart radio. Maybe the LMS's matching of artist
> names should be case insensitive for a more consistent result. (And yes,
> I'd like my spelling to take precedence over Tidal's.)

The integration relies on the same code as the regular scan, which we
decided years ago to no longer apply any kind of magic to try to match
different spellings. Now I do understand that with online music you have
no control. I'll see what I can do.

--

Michael

[mherger]

> There is one more odd thing about case sensitivity. If my spelling of an
> artist name differs from Tidal's only in case (e.g. ABBA or Stream of
> Passion), the LMS creates two different Artist entries for it, but the

Tonight's 8.2 build should fix this.

--

Michael

[slartibartfast]

> There is one more odd thing about case sensitivity. If my spelling of an
> artist name differs from Tidal's only in case (e.g. ABBA or Stream of
> Passion), the LMS creates two different Artist entries for it, but the

Tonight's 8.2 build should fix this.

--

Michael

If I have "Mott the Hoople" locally and "Mott The Hoople" from Spotify will they both appear under the local spelling?

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