It’s maybe a l ittle bit contradicting an old post of mine but I was surprised several times when I had to remove artist(s) from my release (group) searches from foobar2000 in order to find them.
For example, Various Artists does have Compilation in its aliases.
This makes the [indexed search](https://musicbrainz.org/search?type=artist&query=compilation) or [direct search](https://musicbrainz.org/search?type=artist&query=compilation&method=direct) find it: very good.
For advanced search, defaults finds it also good (as it searches in alias, artist and sortname by default, like indexed search probably).
I wonder what is primary_alias (it does not work), but this is secondary to me, I don’t need search fields in artist search, now.
My main question is around release and release group searches, with release or release group artist included in the query
Not using artist, searching titles like Greatest Hits or often used song or album titles would not find my result easily.
For some time now, I have noticed that the artist aliases were not looked into by my album searches, and I have to unfortunately remove artist from my queries as a second step.
The artist search fields we have for release and release group searches are:
artist
(part of) the combined credited artist name for the release (group), including join phrases (e.g. “Artist X feat.”)artistname
(part of) the name of any of the release (group) artists
None of them will look into anything else than the name, it will not use aliases, and I guess it will not use sort name and maybe not list of all current artist credits (other than the one on the matched albums).
It would be great if it did!
The following searches would find my album, without having to remove the artist.
- artist:“COMPILATION” AND release:“LE COFFRET IDÉAL JAZZ”
- artistname:“COMPILATION” AND release:“LE COFFRET IDÉAL JAZZ”
- artist:“COMPILATION” AND releasegroup:“LE COFFRET IDÉAL JAZZ”
- artistname:“COMPILATION” AND releasegroup:“LE COFFRET IDÉAL JAZZ”
- artist:“David Bowie” AND “The Ching-A-Ling Song”
- artistname:“David Bowie” AND “The Ching-A-Ling Song”
- artist:“David Bowie” AND “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving”
- artistname:“David Bowie” AND “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving”
This one works because it’s the opposite of the others, instead of searching an alias of an artist, I search the main name of the artist, despite the release being by another artist credit
* I know I don’t need to use release and releasegroup fields, as they are the default search fields used when none is give.
