These three pieces of data answer different questions (although they often overlap).
- track artist: usually, who is credited in the track list? For certain specific types of releases there are other guidelines.
- recording artist: usually, who was credited for this recording (as the track artist) on its earliest release? For certain specific types of releases there are other guidelines.
- composer: who composed the work? This is a matter of fact, and doesn’t rely so heavily on the credits of a specific release.[quote=“iantresman, post:1, topic:151659”]
Why do we have an option to manually override either, rather than the database choosing to display the classic recording composer or performer (if non classical)?
[/quote]
It’s been talked about (example), but there’s not a bulletproof way to programmatically determine which releases are “classical”. IMO this is a great goal to work towards, but there will always be a need to capture both “what’s on the cover?” and “what’s factually true and/or contextually relevant?”
There are, of course, ways to override/customize how Picard populates your tags.
Almost never.
It’s possible to e.g. use jazz forms/idioms in a “classical” or “operatic” context, but generally jazz is handled like any other pop music in MB, which is to say it uses the general style guidelines.