DJ mix Various Artists

MusicBrainz Style
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1

I’m just trying to organize my “Various Artist” albums in Kodi and have come up against a problem.

I’m importing the fabric music series but all the “Album Artist” tags are for the DJ name in this case “Craig Richards” and not “Various Artists”. This persists for all 92 of the releases. The first is a good example:

Is there any way I will be able to filter these into a Various Artist view? Kodi uses all the musicbrainz tags but can only show what Picard/Musicbrainz data sets.

As far as I can tell from the picard tags, the only tag that indicates this is a multi artist release is the AcoustID tag.

Any ideas?

2

Here is the Kodi thread for anyone interested.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=320425

We have identified some clear inconsistencies with the MusicBrainz data.

3

I did a brief scan of that thread, and it sounds like your “clear inconsistencies” are still referring to DJs being listed as the release artists – feel free to correct me if I’ve missed something. Anyway, we do consider that to be the correct release artist; it doesn’t matter that the tracks are all from different artists, the DJ is the one who’s remixing them and who’s released the compilation. It is definitely possible to write a script “fixing” that, though, as long as you’re all right with it also changing releases that have featured artists on some of the tracks, or are willing to go into the options frequently to turn it on and off:

$if(%_multiartist%,
	$set(albumartist,Various Artists)
	$set(albumartistsort,Various Artists)
	$set(musicbrainz_albumartistid,89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377)
)

Finally, was your naming the AcoustID tag a mistype? That is going to differentiate the original recording from the DJ mix recording, but only because the two sound different; it doesn’t actually care how many artists are on the album.

4 Likes
4

Thanks for the reply, but none of those albums are DJ “remix” albums (a remix is a song that is modified by a producer or DJ, not one that simply mixes another song on an album). These Fabric releases are a DJ mixing Various other artists work, normally without any other modification.

But thanks for the clarification, it looks like I having any DJ mix release in my collection with standard musicbrainz tag will always pollute the main artist list too much.

I’ve fixed by adding the various artists ID to the Music_Brainz_Release_Artist_ID like here:

So I finally found a way to fix this for my whole collection which is a good 2000 Various Artist mixes.

It’s a real shame MusicBrainz simply records the artist wrong on DJ Mix releases and doesn’t use the tag DJMixer instead! But for now there is a fix:

Step 1
Load up MP3Tag software >> File >> Change Directory >> Select the root of your Various Artists folder (This will take some time to load probably)

Step 2
Once loaded select a single track and click crtl + A (this will select all tracks)

Step 3
Right click on the highlighted tracks somewhere and click “Extended Tags”

Step 4
Change:
ALBUMARTIST >> Various Artists
ALBUMARTISTSORT >> Various Artists
MUSICBRAINZALBUMARTISTID >> 89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377

Like so:

You can now save all the files (again this takes a bit of time)

And now you should only see the Various artist node in your Artist list and not all the individual DJ’s.

Source: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=320425&pid=2663859#pid2663859

It works, but its a shame I have to edit default tags.

5

MB credits things by artist/release intent.
Judging by the size of the DJ’s name on the cover I would say the release is definitely intended to be considered ‘by’ that artist. Even if it’s not consistent with other releases we don’t tend to ‘fix’/standardise things to individual preference.

By the way you can edit tags directly in Picard as well, just select the tracks or albums, type into the tag fields (the very bottom right panel), and hit Save.

1 Like
6

I’ve come up against this again 9 months later, its driving me crazy having to change 3 tags on over half of the VA releases I have in my collection. The worst thing is there seems to be so many inconsistent releases on the database. I can see some like the large mix series of music which are 50% Various Artists and 50% just DJ names who happen to have mixed the release on the album art. The only differing factor appears to be the cover art with the DJ’s name on it…

Example of the inconsistencies

Image1
Image1760×380 121 KB

To labor the point even future, this release by “Bruno” doesnt even have a single song by him on…

Image2
Image2790×272 41.5 KB

I can only repeat the music within these compilations is mostly nothing to do with the DJ Mixing them. I am talking about the ALBUM ARTIST tag here in Picard which is just plain wrong to say that “Craig Richards” is the “Artist”. The ALBUMARTIST should be “Various Artists” and the DJMIXER tag should be “Craig Richards” in my opinion.

One thing I havent worked out is how to enter the DJMIXER tag on musicbrainz website in edits? If that was available then this could be fixed once and for all and we wouldn’t get 100’s or so called “Artists” in a database collection

1 Like
7

If you edit the relationships for the release, DJ-mixer can be selected as one of the artist relationships for selected recordings or for the whole release. Is this what you’re looking for?

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8

I’d be in favor of moving all the releases assigned to Toni Simonen to Various Artists instead.
Btw he isn’t even a DJ-mixer on any of these, just “Compiler”. The three releases filed as “DJ-mixes” are probably wrong too.

1 Like
9

Discussion was already there:
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/40459643

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10

If the dj that compiled the cd is known and is on the front or back cover there is nothing wrong in including that as the album artist.
Most of the time this information is not known so using the generic various artists is a good placeholder.

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11

There is one huge problem with that approach though that it means that Sets of music such as Cafe Del Mar, Fabric, Ministry of sound all have different Artists, based on the coverart. This makes it very hard to browse them on Media Centers such as Kodi. In fact it messes up the entire “Artists” library node, filling it with random VA “compilers” instead of actual artists.

12

Keep in mind that MusicBrainz’s goal is to describe information as accurately and in-depth/detailed as possible; it’s up to consumers of MusicBrainz’s data to utilise this to the best effect. One way could be for Kodi to utilise Series, another could be to set up rules in Picard (or whatever tagger you prefer to use) to override the album artist for compilations with “Various Artists”.

3 Likes
13

Yes, but that’s really just a preference of you. The database itself is not supposed to represent data exactly how you need it for tagging, but how it is actually credited.

There are scripting ways to fix this on the taggings side. @WovenTales posted an example above on how to do this for all %_multiartist% releases. You can also define a set of exceptions by artist and / or album ID.

Or you could do it the semi automatic way by defining a script like below, set it to inactive and only run it on selected albums via context menu “Run script…” (this needs at least Picard 2.0.3):

$set(albumartist,Various Artists)
$set(albumartistsort,Various Artists)
$set(musicbrainz_albumartistid,89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377)
3 Likes
14

To complete good @Freso and @outsidecontext answers, here are the series related to your request, already there:

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15

“Yes, but that’s really just a preference of you. The database itself is not supposed to represent data exactly how you need it for tagging, but how it is actually credited.”

But that’s actually my point really, the artist is not “credited” as an artist. In the example of Cafe Del Mar above, he is credited as the compiler, not the artist. Checking the back cover clearly confirms this.

In my opinion, its too simplistic to say that a name on the cover = the artist. That’s my basic point.

I guess I am not going to convince people as they have already made up their minds, its just a shame that a these inconsistencies exist. I’m sure there is a technical solution though, such as listing djmixer tag or something like that.