Go back to Part 6: Classical Track Artist
The Album Artist stored in MusicBrainz replicates what is written on the spine or front of the disc.This represents the the main people that the release is credited to.
For Pop/Rock this is quite straight forward, usually a single performer or band is credited for the release as a whole and all the tracks, with perhaps an additional performer credited on a couple of tracks.
For Classical music its more complex since first of all more people are involved such as composers, conductors, performers and orchestras. Secondly these people are not all involved in all tracks, certainly when multiple works by different composers exist on a single album
The Album Artist can be used in two different ways:
1. As a way to browse for releases that a particular person or group were involved in.
2. As a way to correctly identify a release, allowing us to differentiate between different releases with the same or similar names.
And this gives us a dilemma.......
To achieve 1. when a release is credited to multiple people it is better to map album_artists to albumartist so then you can browse by the individuals involved in a release.
But to achieve 2. it is easier to identify the albums if you can see the full list of people credited to the album.
If we want to both, then we can configure as follows
Add Album_artists to indexTags
Add albumartist_sort, album_artists_sort to itemTags
Add albumartist.value.sort={albumartistsort}, album_artists.value.sort={album_artists_sort} to TagValue
![]()
This leaves the Artist index as the default configuration, this is useful for differentiating between similarly named albums.
It then adds a Album_Artists index that lets us browse by the individuals credited on the release and is useful for viewing all releases that they were a principal person or group.
If alternatively we only want to be able to browse by the individual album artists we can map just albums_artists to album_artist in a similar way to how we configured track artists
Add album_artists:-albumartist to aliasTags
Add album_artists_sort to itemTags
Add albumartist.value.sort={album_artists_sort} to tagValue
![]()
The other thing to consider is if we want the composers to be part of the album artist fields since they may not be actively involved in the actual performance. We can easily strip these out with SongKong using the Remove Composer from Album Artist option
![]()
The Album Artist stored in MusicBrainz replicates what is written on the spine or front of the disc.This represents the the main people that the release is credited to.
For Pop/Rock this is quite straight forward, usually a single performer or band is credited for the release as a whole and all the tracks, with perhaps an additional performer credited on a couple of tracks.
For Classical music its more complex since first of all more people are involved such as composers, conductors, performers and orchestras. Secondly these people are not all involved in all tracks, certainly when multiple works by different composers exist on a single album
The Album Artist can be used in two different ways:
1. As a way to browse for releases that a particular person or group were involved in.
2. As a way to correctly identify a release, allowing us to differentiate between different releases with the same or similar names.
And this gives us a dilemma.......
To achieve 1. when a release is credited to multiple people it is better to map album_artists to albumartist so then you can browse by the individuals involved in a release.
But to achieve 2. it is easier to identify the albums if you can see the full list of people credited to the album.
If we want to both, then we can configure as follows
Add Album_artists to indexTags
Add albumartist_sort, album_artists_sort to itemTags
Add albumartist.value.sort={albumartistsort}, album_artists.value.sort={album_artists_sort} to TagValue
This leaves the Artist index as the default configuration, this is useful for differentiating between similarly named albums.
It then adds a Album_Artists index that lets us browse by the individuals credited on the release and is useful for viewing all releases that they were a principal person or group.
Add album_artists:-albumartist to aliasTags
Add album_artists_sort to itemTags
Add albumartist.value.sort={album_artists_sort} to tagValue
Composer in Album Artist
The other thing to consider is if we want the composers to be part of the album artist fields since they may not be actively involved in the actual performance. We can easily strip these out with SongKong using the Remove Composer from Album Artist option
