OK, thinking as a programmer considering a Picard plugin or feature to generate a short directory name out of the Release Artist credits for a Release, here’s what I would want the database to supply in order to let me make a concise string:
- Deliver a list of Artist references, instead of a Release Artist string.
- For each Artist, deliver data about whether the credit was Very Important, Moderately Important, Less Important (or some multi-valued scale of importance)
- Deliver the ordering of Artist references as credited.
- For each Artist, be able to supply the Artist name in a variety of abbreviations: Full Name, Last Name only, Last Name plus First Initial, Initials Only. Also, do the equivalents for any language a name might be in: Japanese, Chinese, Russian, German, etc. Don’t forget to handle special words correctly, e.g. “von” in “von Karajan”.
- Deliver the Release date. Sometimes, in classical music, the same primary performers will record the same work multiple times in successive years. e.g. Maria Callas and Tullio Serafin performing “Norma” in 1954 and 1960. Or re-releases.
Then I can write code that successively shortens the less important names, then drops the less important names, then shortens the more important names, then reduces the more important names to initials.
Without it, the best I really can do is truncate the string, regardless of whether the names I truncate are important or not.
It’s all possible in theory, but the database is a long way from storing this data, much less delivering it to a tagger via an API. In the meantime, isn’t it reasonable to have the tagger’s use of a string be one consideration in the guidelines for how editors construct that string?