I just started using MusicBrainz Picard but recently noticed that an artist like Tommy Emmanuel has several different possible “join phrases”. Is there a way to have the album artist/artist fields not include these “join phrases”? They confuse music players like Jellyfin and Navidrome, preventing them from being able to fetch artist information like their images and bio, and additionally creating a number of alternative names for the same person, even though they’re pretty much just minor syntactical changes (cgp, c.g.p., CGP, C.G.P., etc).
I have “Metadata > Use standardized artist names” checked and turned off “Translate artist names…” for testing, but to no avail. I could manually remove the suffix, but then how do I know how many albums/artists will have this happen (and possibly with many different “join phrases”)?
If you don’t want join phrases in general you could just use the plain list of album artists using scripting:
$set(albumartist,%_albumartists%)
For the artist tag the same would be:
$set(artist,%artists%)
Not that there is no underscore here, as artists is also a regular tag.
With the scripts you just get the (album) artists enumerated, without any additional join phrases in between.
Arguably the join phrases are also wrongly used for this specific artist, especially on the albums where he is credited as the only artist. If he is credited as “Tommy Emanuel CGP” on the release the artist credit should be set that way. “CGP” is not a join phrase.
This works well for those two fields but the join phrase still ends up showing in “Artist Sort Order” and “Album Artist Sort Order”
Is there an easy way to remove it there too?
Also I think that makes sense, having CGP be credited instead of being a join phrase. Even then though I don’t really understand why a join phrase would be used for a singular artist. Feat I think is another join phrase, and I don’t think you would have “Feat Tommy Emmanuel”, so should join phrases not only apply when you have multiple artists?
I guess though one person made the mistake adding CGP in as a join phrase and then everyone after just saw it and ran with it. Should I request a change to remove the CGP?
If you don’t want the as-credited join phrases, you can (probably) reconstruct the artist credits yourself with the variables exposed by Artist Variables Plugin
If it was possible to do without a plugin for artist/album artist surely it’s also possible to do without a plugin in a similarly simple way for the sort fields too though right