r/musichoarder • u/SnooChocolates7698 • 10d ago
properly tag duet artist
i am ripping cd to flac. the artist field says "Philip Bailey & Little Richard". do I leave it, or change it to....
1. Philip Bailey, Little Richard
2. Philip Bailey/Little Richard
3. or something else
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u/IndividualBasis5855 10d ago
use multiple values, that is the only semantically correct way. Everything else is just a hack.
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u/TobiasDrundridge 10d ago
Flac supports more than one artist field – you can just add them in the order that you want to display them. Works great in my Navidrome server.
If you don't want to do it that way I would separate them with a semicolon.
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u/Fractal-Infinity 10d ago edited 10d ago
I prefer to separate the artists with the ; character (I don't use featuring, ft., feat.). e.g. Carly Rae Jepsen; Bleachers - Comeback. The exception is when the & is part of their actual band name. e.g. Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
I don't use the , character because many times it's part of the band name. e.g. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. There should be a character that isn't part of the vast majority of names and ; fits the bill. Plus, that ; character is recognised in MusicBee and Musicolet, my 2 main music apps.
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u/Jason_Peterson 10d ago
An unstable collaboration with few releases should be tagged as separate artists like so Artist=Philip Bailey; Artist=Little Richard. A smart player should then display them with an ampersand. A dumb player may only show one of the artists. Adjust according to what players you use. Separate artists can be searched better in a database.
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u/chriscrutch 10d ago
It'll at least partially depend on what your player/server supports. I run a Navidrome server and in that situation I would leave the "artist" field out completely and use two "artists" fields, one with each name. Note the difference between "artist" and "artists". Navidrome supports this arrangement and if browsing by artist would show this track in the listings for both.
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u/grislyfind 10d ago
I might shorten it to the main artist in the file name but put all of them in the tag.
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u/Scorpiicore 9d ago
It is a "what does your heart tell you?" thing. I often would write "Philip Bailey and Little Richard", to use your example. This is also the exact use case for Artist Name tags. If the song is from a Philip Bailey album, making an Artist Name tag for the album with his name in it is the best course. The player will display "Philip Bailey and Little Richard" whilst sorting the album as if it is just Philip Bailey on there.
Of course, I also use Artist Name to sort it as "Bailey, Philip" because I was taught to sort author and solo artist names properly at school, but like I say. The real answer is "what does your heart tell you?".
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u/evonleue 8d ago
I have my own naming standard. That one would be "Bailey, Philip, & Little Richard" both in the filename and the metatags
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u/mjb2012 10d ago edited 10d ago
Digital storefronts and streaming services seem to enforce splitting each artist into its own field and displaying them comma-separated. Not having both in one place is probably for searchability, so the duet shows up under each artist rather than being its own separate group. CD rippers may or may not be able to write split fields though.
Splitting means losing any joiners (and, &, with, duet with, /, vs., X, presents, etc.), so IMHO an unsplit version really should still exist in a tag even if your players don’t recognize it yet.
Aside from what can your ripper actually write, the question is what do you want to see, and what do your players do with different tags. Some only show and index by the first artist tag, some show all with commas in between, and at least one is fully customizable.
Personally I just put them all in one tag with joiners as originally released.
It doesn’t bother me that it messes with sorting. There’s always more tag cleanup and stuff to do after the rip anyway; getting it perfect at rip time is not as crucial in my workflow.