Display ALBUM_ARTIST in Album list view

[telematoxx]

• Vanilla Music Version (Settings -> About): 1.0.53
• Android Version: 6.0.1
• Phone vendor / model: Fairphone 2
• Application was downloaded from (use [x]):
  • Play Store
  • [ x] F-Droid
  • Other (Nightly Build)
• Did this work in a previous version?
  • Yes
  • No
  • [ x] NA / Don't know.

Description

In Albums list view a user would expect Album related information. Currently it seems that always the ARTIST information of one the albums tracks is displayed. This information is track related - thats fine in case that only one artist contributed to the album but for compilations this is misleading. If ALBUM_ARTIST information is available, it should be used for display/sorting inside Albums list view.

Steps to reproduce the issue

Add an album with different artists to the library, where each track's ALBUM_ARTIST tag information is set to value "Various Artists (test)". Switch to Album list view: Album title will be displayed along with a single track related Artist. "Various Artists (test)" is not displayed.

Screenshot / Video (If applicable)

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[adrian-bl]

Every album has a 'primary artist' which is what we display. The primary artist is just choosen from whatever we see as artist while creating the album entry.

I wonder if it would make sense to use Album_artist in this case (and fall back to artist if not present) or to have an option in the media library settings to choose the behavior.

[telematoxx]

What is the different meaning of 'primary artist' compared to ALBUM_ARTIST tag field?

[adrian-bl]

primary artist is an 'internal' concept of our database schema:
It is used to link an album entry to an artist entry

[Kaned1as]

Do we need media-db schema update to support this?

[adrian-bl]

Probably not:

We join PRIMARY_ARTIST_ID with TABLE_CONTRIBUTORS, which holds artists, album artists and composers, so it doesn't really matter.

However: there might be some side effects: queries operating on albums (eg: 'More from Artist' in the Albums tab) would suddenly link to album_artists which may not be listed in the artists tab.

[telematoxx]

Regarding "Show more from": If this operation does not switch the tab and the result list contains at least the list entry from that the operation has been invoked, i would not be confused.

[ddv239]

Regarding the "primary artist" field: my recent change that is not merged yet (#721) makes that field always contain the "album artist" value which is also always populated form the "artist" field if not present in the file's tags. This may already have fixed this issue completely, let me know if you think this is the case or not.

[telematoxx]

It sounds to me that this change would solve this issue. Thanks.
(Maybe the product owner can have a look at it - there are some possible side effects and related issues in this Diskussion).