MB takes ENSEMBLE to mean Album Artist, How can I prevent this?

[marlonob]

It seems that, when dealing with FLAC (Vorbis) tags, MB assumes that ENSEMBLE means ALBUM ARTIST.

Here’s the problem: You may have (as I do) a compilation album (or a live album, etc) in which the propper album artist is Various Artists, and also some of these songs may have the tag for the ensemble that performed in the recording (not the same for all tracks). This will cause MB to assign to some tracks “Various Artists” as album artist (via the ALBUMARTIST tag) and “Various Artists; Some Ensamble” to those that also have an ENSEMBLE tag.
This will break the album, specially if you have Album Artist as your first sort key.

How can I prevent MB from including ENSAMBLE as Album Artists and, if possible, make it include it in Musician Credits List instead?

[EffenBlue]

So what do you have in the Artist field?

For compilations and soundtracks I have "Various Artists" as the Album Artist and the artist of the actual track as the Artist.
Also for dealing with guest artists, bands or choirs on a track, I created a custom tag called Featuring.

So for instance Love Me on the 8 Mile Soundtrack would be:
Title = Love Me
Album Artist = Various Artists
Artist = Eminem
Featuring = Obie Trice & 50 Cent

For Frank Sinatra's Luck Be a Lady:
Title =  Luck Be a Lady
Album Artist = Frank Sinatra
Artist = Frank Sinatra
Featuring = Morris Stoloff & His Orchestra

[theta_wave]

I have <AlbumArtist> filled and <ENSEMBLE> and <PERFORMER> (if filled) populates it and MB displays <AlbumArtist> as "<AlbumArtist>; <ENSEMBLE>; <PERFORMER>".

Most of my <ENSEMBLE> and <PERFORMER> tags were filled unbeknownst to me.  The culprits are CUEtool (reading in the cue fields when splitting) and Mediamonkey.  The latter has a tendency to replace <AlbumArtist> or <BAND> as <ENSEMBLE> when transcoding.

I agree with OP that this is an issue.

[EffenBlue]

Yeah CUEtools (and most other programs/digital stores for that matter) tend to add tags I really don't want, so I pre-edit everything in MP3tag before adding it to MB. You're probably going to end up with a mass tagging project on your hands, hopefully made easier by someone with advanced search and replace knowledge.

[theta_wave]

Yeah CUEtools (and most other programs/digital stores for that matter) tend to add tags I really don't want, so I pre-edit everything in MP3tag before adding it to MB. You're probably going to end up with a mass tagging project on your hands, hopefully made easier by someone with advanced search and replace knowledge.

Just create customtags for <ENSEMBLE> and <PERFORMER> (use tag inspector on the affected files to ensure that MB will recognize those tags), apply and save.  Maybe that eliminates the confusion with <AlbumArtist>.  Then create an autoplaylist with the rule that <ENSEMBLE> or <PERFORMER> is known and clear them out or use advance find and replace to tack them onto another tag (like <Involved People> or something).

However, back to OP's point.  Displaying <AlbumArtist> should only display <AlbumArtist> and not conflate with other tag fields.

[marlonob]

Thanks, ssri, a custom tag cleared out the confusion indeed.

I'm pretty rigorous when dealing with tags. Almost the entirety of my collection is tagged with Picard (the official tagger for MusicBrainz) and I agree with most of their conventions. Great part of my love for MB is because it let me use various tags to customize my collection.

Something similar occurred with the tag PERFORMER (MB included it as <Artist>, but Picard use it to annotate the musician credits (violinist, drummer, bass, orchestra, vocals, chorus, etc.)), but in that case I was able to correct it by modifying the file Configuration.xml in the installation folder, and map it to the <Musician Credits List> Vorbis-tag for MB. I had tried the same in this case, but, for this to work, I had to deal with the PERFORMER problem again, and it doesn't seem that ENSEMBLE can be mapped to any other MB tag in this file.

I have modified Configuration.xml to map other vorbis tags from Picard to MB standards (i.e <Media Type> = MEDIA, <Original Year> = ORIGINALDATE, <Set Subtitle> = DISCSUBTITLE). Maybe we should make a petition in the wishlist forum to have an easy way to map Vorbis tags (since there is no standard for Vorbis).