How to deal with differences in naming for a single artist?

MusicBrainz Picard
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Hi all

I just started using Picard and it’s been a steep learning curve so far :slight_smile: I tagged my music collection by hand with mp3tag for years and now finally I made the leap to something more modern, and I still feel I was faster doing it manually, haha, but I guess it just takes some time and getting used to.

A situation I came across twice now, is, when different ‘names’ exist in the database for a single artist. Two examples are:

What I’m doing right now:
I copied my whole music library and use Picard on every artist/album and adjust tags to end up with a golden CD icon. That’s working okay so far, except for the case mentioned above, in which I end up with the discography of a single artist split over more than one folder (Dødheimsgard/ DHG/, etc.), which of course, I don’t want. It also splits the artist into two in any music player library.

Now I am wondering how to avoid this situation. And I forsee this coming up a lot, since even a simple, wrong apostrophe leads to that outcome. One could now of course re-add those releases again, with the preferred artist name, but that’s useless work and clutters the DB.

I also found ‘Picard → Options → Advanced → Tags to ignore for comparison’, but of course I wouldn’t want to add those on a global scale.

What I’m looking for is:
A configuration for Picard, path- or name-based, to always use a chosen, preferred artist name, either in some sort of global config file or as a hidden file in the artist folder (i.e. .picard), the first one being preferable.

Does anything like this exist, or am I maybe just doing something completely wrong? Thanks for any help and advice. :slight_smile:

Edit: For now I just forced Picard to ‘Use original values’, but of course if I ever load this artist into Picard again, I’d have to remember to do the same again, and again. So I’m looking for a permanent solution where I don’t have to keep the exceptions in the back of my head every time I touch my collection. :slight_smile:

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I don’t think I use this feature in Picard, but “Use standardized artist names” might be what you’re looking for: Metadata Options — MusicBrainz Picard v2.12.3 documentation

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Wow, I don’t know how I managed to miss this one. Tested on the two cases from above and it works, thank you so much!

One question, since the documentation doesn’t mention it:
On what field/value is this option based on? Where’s the information coming from, to use artist name A over B?

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Other people will be able to answer more authoritatively than me, but from looking at the code, I suspect that a somewhat-simplified explanation is that it’s using a translated primary alias if “Translate artist names” is checked, the main name on the artist entity if “Use standardized artist names” is checked, and the track (or recording) credit otherwise.

This stuff is tricky, though. Some earlier discussion:

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The “standardized” name is the name on the artist record, and the “credited” name is the way it is entered on the release or track. When an artist is linked to a release/track/recording/etc. it is by the MBID of the artist record, but the artist name could be spelled differently because of the way it appears on the release (album). This different spelling is the “credited” name. This is the case in the two examples you provided.

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Thank you both for answering, that clarifies it neatly. :slight_smile:

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