Composer standardized names and MB/picard

Greetings, community. In this thread i am seeking your help with some aspects of artist names in MB, how they retrieved and “modified” by Picard and displayed in music player, but before directly form my questions, i should post some prehistory for this, so you could understand why do i need all this at all.

99% of music in my collection are instrumental music, which mostly soundtracks or production music. In most cases that mean music has only composer credits (i.e no lyricist credits or several “general” writers as in case of groups for example). This is important to notice as it directly correlates with my questions.

So basing on this i organized my collection solely based on composer credits. This way i can see which composer “dominates” here and also seek more releases of certain composer if i like his music. Here is the screenshot of how it looks like in my player:

Such organization of course requires from me creating works and adding composers credits when i add new releases myself or to add them to already existing releases. +I am additionaly check composer credits by scraping PRO units like ASCAP or GEMA to double check the data.

Since my organization are so “composer-centric” this rises several problems and questions for me.

  1. In my collection i want always to use the single and “standardized” “full legal” composer name like the way they credited (mostly) in PRO units. So lets say if composer credited as “Junkie XL” or “Tom Holkenborg” i want to always him see in my player as “Antonius Bernardus Johannes Thomas Holkenborg”. I am not sure what is real “full” name could be for some people and what nuances could be hidden behind this topic, but more commonly i see “Name - Father Name - Surname” template. using full name also could help me to evade additional name abbreviations, that exist in English, which i often cannot understand.

  2. I want to use only latin letters for composer names. So for example if “Anže Rozman” then it should be “Anze Rozman” for me.

I know that Picard have options both for English and standardized artist names, but this works only for artist tags, right? So is it somehow possible to cover composer tags too? As for me i would prefer to use one of added artist aliases on MB which stands for “full real name” and use Picard to retrieve it and set as “default” composer name.

This was about naming and now i want to ask about artist “splitted” for several entities in MB (like “performs as”). Here is an example:

In one case its “real” name, in other case - “alias”. Since there are different IDs which one i should use for work credits? Because if part of works would be credited by one ID and another - by other one, then in music player it would be different people (since their composer tags are different). Also composer have their IPIs - since they are unique, it wouldnt be correct if two entities in MB would have the same IPI?

Something like this. Hope i described my thoughts more or less clearly. :slight_smile:

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For the non-Picard part: it’s legitimate to have two or more artists with the same IPI in MusicBrainz if they are the same person but qualify to be split as per the artist guidelines. As a reminder:

In some cases, a person (or, more rarely, a group) can perform under multiple names that they actually consider different projects, and not just alternative names. In that case, you should add each artist separately. If they’re a person, a separate legal name artist should be added, and linked to all performance names with the is person (“performs as”) relationship. In this case, do not add legal name aliases to the performance names.

In cases like those, if the pseudonym is what is used to credit the works for that project, then that is what should be used - but I’m sure a Picard plugin could follow the legal name relationships and change that in the tags if preferred.

Ok, then i have some more questions.

Lets say a writer have several IPIs - does another IPI means that he is participating in another project? I mean on iswcnet.cisac.org you can do a search by IPI and often with another IPI writer could be differently credited. This is a good tool to check if its the same person or not and also to check writer full name and/or aliases. When I add a new artist to MB i usually try to assign all known IPIs and aliases to this single new entry (i.e. i dont split them). This is probably coz i am working mostly with “works” and not “recordings” and cant say for sure if its different “performs as” project.

Em, picard plugin for name relationships? For sure i missed something… So this plugin can potentially solve the problem i mentioned above when works from the same (physical) person credited via different MB artists (but linked though a relationships)?

And also a question to Picard developers - i just thought it could be a good feature to give a more flexible way for users to choose how they want to credit artists in their tags - via full/short/default/common/standardized name or alias.