Context / terminology:
In MusicBrainz Picard, the AlbumArtistId field is effectively the same as the Release Artist ID. By contrast, the ArtistId field already handles multiple artists correctly.
Steps to reproduce:
Use albums or tracks credited to multiple artists. When all artists are included in the AlbumArtistId (Release Artist ID) field, Symfonium selects the first artist’s ID and then propagates the joined album artist name (from the AlbumArtist field, e.g. “Artist A & Artist B”) across all releases associated with that first artist’s solo ID.
Observed behavior:
The combined album artist name is incorrectly applied to the full body of work of the first credited artist, even for releases where that artist appears solo.
Expected behavior:
Multiple album artists should be handled similarly to how ArtistId is handled:
• The collaboration should be treated as its own entity
• The album should be referenced from each contributing artist without polluting their solo discographies
Workaround:
Users can avoid this issue by omitting the AlbumArtistId field entirely when tagging. However, since the logic for correctly handling multiple artists already exists for ArtistId, it would make sense to apply the same logic to AlbumArtistId as well.
Logs:
Upload description: najchris11
Additional information:
I do have more screenshots in the Reddit post, and I’ve submitted files that should help reproduce the issue. Thanks for your attention!
So 2 different things.
Yet the MBIds are:
Artist: 7cb6e306-a75b-48b4-be00-2c4aa6bbe3a8
Album Artist: 7cb6e306-a75b-48b4-be00-2c4aa6bbe3a8
So the same IDs so they are the same artist. Depending on the order of the scan the resulting artist will be GoldLink or GoldLink & Miguel since your tags says that they are the same.
So as explained, if 2 artists have the same MBids they are the same.
So the album artist is not associated with a single MBID, there are two distinct MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID values, written exactly the same way Picard writes multi-artist releases.
At the track level, MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID contains the same two MBIDs and is handled correctly. The issue seems to be that only the first MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID is being respected internally, causing the joined album artist name to propagate to that artist’s solo discography.
I’m not intentionally assigning the same MBID to different artist names; the collapse appears to happen after parsing. My expectation was that MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID would follow the same multi-artist logic already used for MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID.
GoldLink & Miguel is not a multi artist field, it’s a single artist. If you actually want it to be a multi artist then you need to add " & " as an artist separator in the provider settings.
I think there may be a misunderstanding, I’m not relying on the album artist string being split into multiple artists.
The release already has multiple album artists explicitly defined via MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID (GoldLink MBID + Miguel MBID), written by Picard. That’s independent of any separator configuration.
My expectation was that album artist identity would be resolved from the MBIDs, similar to how MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID is handled, rather than from parsing the ALBUMARTIST string. Adding & as a separator would change the semantics of the release rather than address why only the first album artist MBID is being respected.
You enter 1 single value for album artist, but 2 mbids … That can not work. The app does not query musicbrainz servers. It uses the data in your tags.
Your tags have conflicting data with 1 artist and multiple ids. As said now half a dozen time, your data needs to be consistent and match.
Either “GoldLink & Miguel” is an artist and it needs to have it’s own mbid to not clash with other artists, or you need to enter 2 album artists with the already 2 mbids, or you need to split. But considering that you are even using album sort artist with “GoldLink & Miguel” everything points to this value being a single artist.
Thanks for clarifying — that helps.
I understand now that Symfonium expects a 1:1 relationship between album artist values and MBIDs, and doesn’t support MusicBrainz-style multi-artist album credits unless they’re split or represented as a single artist entity.
My original expectation was based on Picard/MusicBrainz semantics and the existing multi-artist handling for track artists, but I see that this isn’t how album artists are modeled in the app. I’ll adjust my tagging accordingly.
Symfonium does not have access to music brainz servers so can only rely on tags.
In your example it happens that the artists and the album artist are the same but take any other example where the only available data in the tags is the single album artist name and 2 mbids that may or may not be known by the app from other tracks. What could the app do from such data ? Nothing.
So the app drop the mbid data as not usable since counts does not match and since you don’t use a split all that rest is a single artist without mbid named “A & B” and properly do that.
This is also valid for composers and artists. The only data available to Symfonium is the tags.
Maybe Symfonium could implement a LMS approach to handling multiple album artists:
ALBUMARTIST: JAY Z & Kanye West
ALBUMARTISTS: JAY Z
ALBUMARTISTS: Kanye West
ALBUMARTISTSSORT: Jay-Z
ALBUMARTISTSSORT: West, Kanye
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID: f82bcf78-5b69-4622-a5ef-73800768d9ac
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID: 164f0d73-1234-4e2c-8743-d77bf2191051
Hello!
Yes, LMS solves this issue by supporting ALBUMARTISTS custom tags (see this doc)
(Navidrome took the same approach when multi-artist support was added later on)
