Include Singer as Track Artst for Opera?

MusicBrainz Style
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My interest is particularly in opera where for me the performer for each track is important as it is not always easy to distinguish between different singers and with several recordings of the same work I may wish to check from my control point who is actually singing.

MusicBrainz (MB) still insists on referring to the composer as the artist even in Classical works and I have to accept that, but for the Track Artist I require the singer who I understand should be referred to as the Performer here.

MB frequently gives the names of the principal voices, usually named on the album cover, but in an opera all soloists’ names are needed even for minor parts.

There is not much information on this that I have seen yet so I am posting to ask for some help with how to do this most efficiently.

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Hmm, in MB, track artists are the performers, except for classical, where they are the composers.

But recording artists are always performers, for all types of music.

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Many thanks for your reply. Exactly and that is why I have posted this call for help.

Meanwhile I am struggling with the MB search.
If the work is a recording of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte conducted by Rene Jacobs how should I enter this in the MB search to get to the details. All my efforts have given me several hundred hits. There should only be about half a dozen of the complete recording.

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As @jesus2099 said, recording artists are the performers, but I guess you would like to have these recording artists to be used instead of the track artist, so they would be displayed in your player. Unfortunately this seems to be impossible → see Use recording artist details instead of track artist

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Thanks for the replies. I am tagging each track to work around this. I have a solution but it is quite slow and have been looking for those more experienced in the genre who might have some easier solutions.

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@Budgie2 :

You ask a good question, which I believe actually has many layers and many answers. Here is my first answer.

If I understand, this is your scenario:

  • You are listening to your music, playing from carefully-tagged music files, one for each track of your opera album, via your “control point”, a music-playing app of some sort with a display.
  • You hear something interesting, and ask, “who is singing?”
  • You look at the display of your music-playing app.
  • What you want is for that display to list the singers performing on that track (that music file).
  • You are willing to tag your music files using data from MusicBrainz.
  • You are asking what data to enter into MusicBrainz about your opera album, so that the music files get the necessary tags, so that your music-playing app can display the list of singers.
  • You are not giving details about what metadata tags the music-playing app reads from the music files, and where in the metadata tags the singer information must be located for that app to display it.

So I suggest you start by looking at your music-playing app, your “control point”. Is it capable of displaying singer names? Where in the music file metadata do the singer names need to be in order for the app to find them and display them?

The metadata structures for music files have multiple tags which can hold singer names. There is a more widely-used but simple-minded tag, Artists. There are more specific but less used tags, Composer, Conductor, Performer, involved_people, and trackartist. (Learn more about these tags in Appendix B: Tag Mapping of the MusicBrainz Picard tagger’s documentation.)

Which of these tags can your “control point” read and use? When you know that, you will know how you need to tag your files to empower your control point. Or, you may discover that your control point is not capable of displaying the singers the way you want. In that case, you may want to look for a better music-playing app, one which is better at handling the complexity of opera metadata. (Spoiler: there aren’t many out there.)

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Next layer: how can you tag your music files with metadata tuned to the needs of your music player? My suggestion: the MusicBrainz Picard tagging app and the ClassicalExtras plug-in are indispensable. They each have a lot of controls and a lot of documentation. Try to figure out how to make them do what you want, and ask further questions, in new topics, on this forum as required.

Next layer: how can you enter metadata into MusicBrainz in a way which lets the tagger do its work well? My advice: enter the data in the most correct way, using the best MusicBrainz structures you can. Rely on the tagger to transform that data into something your music player can use. Resist the urge to put things into MusicBrainz the wrong way as a hack to get your music player to work.

As Hollander said in another topic,

Artist-Recording relationships are the appropriate MusicBrainz structure for representing singers performing in a track of an opera album. Be diligent about entering singer (and instrumentalist and symphony and conductor) relationships for every recording (“track”). While you are at it, learn about MusicBrainz Works. Be sure that there are Work entities for every opera, and part of an opera, performed in the opera albums you enter. Add appropriate Recording-Work relationships.

As part of this work, you will become good friends with the Classical Style Guide (CSG). It is complex, because classical music metadata is complex. As you have questions, ask them (in new topics, in the MusicBrainz Style) category) in this forum.

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I would suggest phrasing that differently. First, MusicBrainz is not the actor here. Second, there are multiple actors, so it’s important to be clear about which one. Thirdly, there is not one “the artist”, there are three.

MusicBrainz is a database which has fields for Album Artist, Track Artist, Recording Artist, and for Artist-Release and Artist-Recording relationships. So, there are three different Artist fields, plus all these relationships. The CSG calls for putting certain data in those fields. Individual MusicBrainz contributors may do better or worse jobs of living up to the CSG with their data entry. The database structure, the CSG, and each contributor are all actors here.

The CSG’s Release Artist style says to “include the writers (composers, lyricists, librettists) and performers featured on the front cover”. The CSG Track Artist style says, “The Track Artist field should contain just the composer; not the performer(s).” The CSG Recording Artist style says, “The Recording Artist field should contain the most important performers who appear on that specific recording…. Note that this field is just a summary. To credit performers properly, you should always link the performers to the appropriate recordings using Advanced Relationships.”

Let me pick this apart a little bit. I assume you mean that the singer should be entered in the Track Artist field of the MusicBrainz database for the Release entry corresponding to the opera album you are listening to. Why do you “require” this?

To state the obvious, such edits are contrary to the Classical Style Guide’s Track Artist style. If you make edits to put performers into the Track Artist field, you will get push-back. Appropriately so, in my opinion.

Is it because your music-playing app only reads Artists tags in music files, and ignores Performer tags? If so, that is a flaw in your music-playing app. Either get a music-playing app which is better at reading metadata tags, or change the way you tag music files so that the wide range of MusicBrainz data is narrowed down to what your music-playing app can use. But don’t make edits with bad style to the MusicBrainz database as a workaround.

Is it because your music-playing app will happily read Performer tags, but your tagging tools can only write to Artists tags? Then get a better tagging tool. I listen to a lot of opera, I value performer information, and I think Picard plus the ClassicalExtras plugin do a very good job of writing the wide range of MusicBrainz data into the full range of metadata tags in music files. But don’t make edits with bad style to the MusicBrainz database as a workaround for limitations in your tagging tools.

Like you, I enjoy opera, and I want to have high-quality performer metadata available when I listen to my opera music files. My experience over many years with MusicBrainz says that the best way to achieve this is to put high-quality data into the MusicBrainz database, without regard to the limitations of music players. I rely on the tagger to adapt to the player’s shortcomings. I am prepared to re-tag over time as my player needs change. I value the other MusicBrainz contributors who entered data for the albums I listen to, and I am prepared to improve on their work, especially by adding performer and work relationships to make the data even better.

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Hi Jim,
I though I had explained this briefly at the outset in my first ever post:-

“My interest is particularly in opera where for me the performer for each track is important as it is not always easy to distinguish between different singers and with several recordings of the same work I may wish to check from my control point who is actually singing.”

The information I seek is from the track actually playing. The Album Artist information is where it should be and is good but for a specific track I need the Track Artist info and I do not believe this is given correctly.

From what I have learned so far, all that is given for track artist is a list of the principal singers, so if a minor singer part is being sung there is no clue as to who is singing.

Others have voiced the same and are editing to correct this. It is just that I am a novice here so am simply trying to follow where others have gone before.

Any limitation or control point or renderer is a secondary matter and as far as I am aware all of these are fine, as are the editing tools I am using. eg:- Linn Majik, minimserver, BubbleDS, EasyTag, SongKong, Jaikoz.

I am not aware of “push back” but in my opinion the Track Artist performer should be just this. I am trying to tag accordingly. The CSG is not in tablets of stone and is always under review. I hope that in time my needs will be more readily accommodated. Does that answer your question?

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OK, let’s pick that apart.

  1. When you say “I need the Track Artist info”, do you mean that you want the Artists metadata tag in your music files to contain the name of every singer audible on the audio of that file?
  2. When you say “I need the Track Artist info”, do you mean that you want the Track Artist field of the MusicBrainz database to contain entries for every singer audible on the audio of that track? Why do you need this? Have you considered other ways of getting answer #1 to be “yes” even if the answer to #2 is “no”?
  3. When you say “I do not believe [CSG Track Artist style] is given correctly.…”, do you mean not correct for the purpose of improving the MusicBrainz database’s representation of truth, or not correct for the purpose of easing your tagging workflow?

Sure there is. A MusicBrainz Recording (which corresponds to an album’s track) can have a Vocals Performance relationship for every singer audible on the audio of that track.

However, some contributors might not have entered relationships for a particular MusicBrainz Recording entry in that much detail. In that case, it is on you to improve MusicBrainz by adding those relationships. That makes the MusicBrainz recording entry detailed enough for your use, and also improves MusicBrainz for others.

In the opinion of others, the existing CSG rules for Track Artist fields are a good balance of competing needs. In the opinion of others, adding performer entries to Track Artist fields, in conflict with the CSG, makes MusicBrainz worse. Are you saying that your opinion should overrule the opinion of other contributors?

Yes, the CSG can be (and has been) modified. However, these changes are usually in the direction of making the MusicBrainz data more faithful to the actual situation (e.g. adding performer relationships) rather than making it less faithful to work around weakness in one person’s tagging tools. I say this as someone who has had proposals for CSG changes rejected.

As I understand it, you can accommodate your needs by changing how you perform tagging. I have not yet seen a need for you to change the CSG, or to pack Track Artist fields with excess entries.

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Just in case that was missed in the lot of other information in Jim’s post, Picard with the ClassicalExtras plugin is the usual go-to for tagger users who want to use all the detailed data MusicBrainz has for classical. That said, it is possible that some of the jthink tools like Jaikoz and SongKong that you seemingly already use have their own ways to use this relationship data - you can ask in the jthink forum for some help with that :slight_smile:

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Budgie2,

Are you interested in changing MusicBrainz’s Classical Style Guide and the entire tagging system, or just changing how your music is catalogued and appears to you when you play it?

I’m not intimately familiar with the MusicBrainz community or infrastructure, but it seems like the Classical Style Guide (CSG), while a “living document”, is not something that is changed lightly. A lot of thought has been put into it. The “what goes into the artist field” question has been discussed a lot in the past, but it seems like majority of the community is firmly behind putting only the composer in the artist field.

I myself prefer having the performer and not the composer in the artist field, but I just change the tags in my music after I run the files through MusicBrainz Picard with the Classical Extras plugin (Disclaimer: I don’t know how frowned upon modifying tags on my end is… but for the music players I use–Kodi, foobar2000, PowerAmp–and the way I organize my music, it just works for me). Is that not something you can do?

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Hi and thanks for the reply. This is kind of where I was at. In fact it is easier to state than to experience in practice. I am not working on this at the moment as SongKong has given me enough for now and I am waiting to access my actual collection hardware which has the booklets so my activity here is on pause.
Thanks again,
Budgie2

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Hello, @Ushavilash!

It looks like you are new to MusicBrainz. Welcome! We are glad to have more people to move this mountain of music metadata.

I love the spirit of “edit the metdata” and “accurate track attribution in opera recordings”. I don’t love the “as … track artists” part. There is a right way to give accurate track attribution, and it is Relationships (sometimes still called “Advanced Relationships” in the docs). The term “track artists” refers to a specific field in the MusicBrainz database, and that field is not the right place to stuff performers in artist tracks.

I will repeat what I wrote above:

Again, I love the spirit of this sentence, as long as we understand “This” to refer to, “Entering a rich set of Relationships according to the Classical Style Guide”.

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Budgie2,

I wrote my own program (called “wax”) for cataloging and playing music. You might be interested because it makes it easy to do most, if not all, of what I think you are seeking. For example, with respect to the cast of operas, here is what the display looks like with the recording of Cosi fan tutte in my collection:

cosi
cosi800×480 107 KB

I do not identify singers in an opera on a per track basis, but here is an example where I do:

unsung
unsung800×480 61.3 KB

When selecting a recording, you start by choosing the genre. Each genre can have its own set of metadata keys. You can have composer/work/conductor for opera and group/title for pop. You can also see that it is possible to specify track groups, which are handy for many things including grouping all the tracks of an act or scene together to make it easy to select a group of tracks for playing and to clarify the relationship between the tracks.

select
select800×480 59.6 KB

When you rip a CD, wax accesses MusicBrainz to obtain as much information as it can find.

I would appreciate having someone else try the program for the purpose of beta testing, so you should let me know if you are interested. One potential stumbling block concerns platform. I do not know what platform you are on, but I designed wax to run on a Raspberry Pi, so it requires Linux (with GTK). I have tested it on Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu.

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@jeffbarish , wax sounds interesting. Are you seeking other users of wax, or feedback about it, or contributions to it? If so, I would encourage you to post an introduction to wax on this forum. Be sure to include the URL for the wax project. General discussion about wax is out of scope for this topic, so I encourage you to put the introduction in a new Topic.