ARTIST vs ARTISTS tag

MusicBrainz Picard
1

My music library is mostly FLAC files created by ripping my CD collection with Exact Audio Copy. Unfortunately I didn’t pay a lot of attention to tagging when I was ripping (I just accepted whatever EAC pulled in) and now have a decent, but not great, library.

I’m trying to tidy things up with Picard and am having issues with tracks that have multiple artists. This seems to be a perennial problem, but I can’t find anything that matches my situation.

I’ve used Picard to identify this album and saved the tags. When I inspect the first track I find:

$ metaflac --list 01\ -\ Playin\'\ with\ my\ Firends.flac | grep ARTIST
    comment[1]: ARTIST=B.B. King
    comment[20]: MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID=dcb03ce3-67a5-4eb3-b2d1-2a12d93a38f3
    comment[21]: ALBUMARTIST=B.B. King
    comment[22]: ALBUMARTISTSORT=King, B.B.
    comment[31]: MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID=dcb03ce3-67a5-4eb3-b2d1-2a12d93a38f3
    comment[32]: MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID=7112c4bc-5b15-4180-bfd5-2ca76745e87c
    comment[33]: ARTISTSORT=King, B.B. feat. Cray, Robert
    comment[34]: ARTISTS=B.B. King
    comment[35]: ARTISTS=Robert Cray

I can’t find any discussion about the use of an ARTISTS (vs ARTIST) tag - I’m sure the discussion is out there, but it’s such a generic term that it’s difficult to search for. I’m wondering why Picard does this and if it’s configurable (maybe using a different tag version?) because my primary music player (MPD) will not search for ARTISTS, only ARTIST. Note that it happily and correctly (IMHO) handles multiple ARTIST tags and also correctly handles the multiple MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID tags.

2

One reason why I write ARTISTS into my tags is Kodi.
Kodi is using this field to determine the actual artists in a song.

Some technical hint:
ARTISTS is written as “User defined text information frame” TXXX and has no direct 4 letter ID3 abbreviation like ARTIST (without ending S) which is saved into TPE1 or ARTISTSORT which is saved into TSOP.

3

One reason why I write ARTISTS into my tags is Kodi.

This wording implies to me that you are choosing to use the ARTISTS tag, but it seems like a default that can’t be changed - am I missing a configuration capability, or misreading your sentence?

ARTISTS is written as “User defined text information frame” TXXX and has no direct 4 letter ID3 abbreviation like ARTIST (without ending S) which is saved into TPE1 or ARTISTSORT which is saved into TSOP.

Thank you for this - interesting reading. Though it hasn’t helped any. It seems that the more I learn about music file tagging to worse it gets.

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4

I use for albumartists
$setmulti(albumartists,%_albumartists%)
if that helps. It populates the albumartists tag for Kodi with the _albumartists variable of Picard (= the album artists)

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5

Typically music players had supported a single artist string for display and that’s also what tagging formats focused on. The artist tag also allows formatted artist credits, like “Artist A feat. B & C”

But as some tools like Kodi wanted to support separate artists the ARTISTS tag was added. Several players now support this.

If your player supports multiple values for artist and you don’t care about formatted credits you can also have artist be multi-valued instead. Just be aware that some players might not handle it and only display the first artist name then.

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6

Keep in mind that tags like TPE1 and TSOP are ID3 tags, which are usually only applied to .mp3 files. Most taggers write Vorbis tags to .flac files, and those labels aren’t used.

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