In “Now Playing” the (optionally displayed) album artist field should be clickable and link to the album artist like the artist and album fields do.
Same goes for when you click the 3 dots on a track to choose “More options”.
That also only displays “Go to album” and “Go to artist”. “Go to album artist” would be useful as well in my opinion.
Problem solved:
When I want to see the albums by “Kenji Kawai”, I have to get to the album artist, which I’ve saved as “Kawai, Kenji” (for example, this applies to all album artists consisting of “last name, first name”).
To see the album artist of a song starting in “Now Playing” I have to click on the album and from there I click on the album artist displayed below the cover or I click the 3 dots in the corner of the cover and from there I can click “Go to Kawai, Kenji”.
That’s 2-3 steps minimum to go from a playing track to the album artist of the album the track is on.
With album artist in “Now Playing” clickable and linked to the “album artist” it would be 1 step instead.
Brought benefits:
Quicker navigation through the app for people who rely on album artist instead of artist tags.
Not feeling stuck when trying to figure out how to go to the album artist coming from a song.
Additional description and context:
Since displaying the album artist in “Now Playing” is optional to begin with I don’t think it would negatively impact the experience for people who do not rely on the “album artist” tag.
Screenshots / Mockup:
I’ve drawn up how I go about going from a song to the album artist in red:
And how it would change with album artist in Now Playing clickable (+ how it would change if “go to album artist” was implemented under “more options”) in cyan.
The first question here would be why is there 2 artists that are the same. You should fix your tags here.
Now about the issue (duplicate), the value displayed in the now playing is just a text value that can contain anything a provider returns and not match any actual artist present. (Same for the composer part)
With that said I can add them to the bottoms sheets.
18ish years ago when I was a kid and started ripping music my father, who has been in the book-selling business his whole life, insisted on sorting artists that are people by “last name, first name” to keep families together alphabetically (which is how he has sorted authors his whole life).
I did not like it but a compromise was found.
The artist tag in my collection contains how the artist is called on the cover (Kenji Kawai) while the album artist tag contains the artist in “last name, first name” (Kawai, Kenji) form.
Since lastfm etc. only use the artist for scrobbles etc. most things work just fine, it’s only a minor inconvenience to me and essential to him.
I’m aware that I could have solved that by using albumartistsort for his players but I was not aware of that tag then (not sure if it even existed yet) and also not tech savvy enough yet to implement that.
Which is why I have >22.000 album artists in the above described style. It’s a bit late to change it now.
It’s never too late to set things right There are programmatical ways to do that, but as you say you are not tech-savvy, that might not be so easy for you.
Also your father (or his thought in your head) might not like the result, because the sorting is corrected then, but the display will be still the how the artist is entered, e.g.
The Caridgans
Phil Collins
Cream
But thanks for sharing your story, I found that quite interesting. My CD collection and thus also my digital collection is sorted by last name as well.
I know how I can change it back with “minimal” effort, I actually have actions in mp3-tag for both ways, from “first name last name” to “last name, first name” and back, even for multiple artists in the same tag (David Crosby; Graham Nash for example). I love regular expressions.
It would still be a huge amount of manual work to check for corner cases and to make sure it doesn’t lead to unwanted or unexpected results. It’s >20TB of data after all.
While I agree that it would be more correct to use albumartistsort, the downsides of the way it is now are minimal for my use case and simply not worth the effort needed to correct the issue imho.
I know what that looks like, and while I think it looks ugly, that’s not what I meant.
I meant I’d set his music player to literally display the “albumartistsort” tag instead of albumartist.
Those should look exactly like what he is used to.
Another downside would be that not all players properly support albumartistsort while pretty much all of them properly display the album artist tag.
His CD and LP collections are sorted by last name as well.
There are programmatical ways to do that, but as you say you are not tech-savvy, that might not be so easy for you.