>in this post, I just want to focus on the "track artist" issue, b/c I
>think it will be hard to get any other necessary changes without first
>having common agreement on this.
>
Agreed.

>in the real world, there is no such thing.  only server creates this
>category or idea.  any given file will have an artist tag, or not.  any
>given file will have an album artist tag, or not.
>
In the real world, talking about music, and not tagging, I think there is a 
concept of track artists, being an artist that appears as a guest on an album, 
and not an artist that you would find on the spine/cover of an album.  I think 
this is what the track artist role was trying to model.

There is no specific "track artist" metadata tag in files, as far as I am 
aware, although many apps have a similar approach to handling album artists or 
track artists to LMS.  FooBar is very similar.

>in the DB for any music application, it should reference the input it is
>given, and not make up stuff.
>
Not sure I agree.  At one point it was discussed that there could be two DB 
layers/models - one that is a representation of physical tag storage that the 
scanner populates, and another that is tailored for the application performance.

>the reasons server did make up this stuff are probably long forgotten,
>but it seems to have something to do with the idea that there should
>only be one list for artists, and then deciding about what qualifies to
>be in this one list or not.  that in and of itself is a terrible
>approach.
>
The approach is that there is only one DB table for all artists, no matter what 
their role.  The list of artists to be displayed is a sub-set query of this, 
depending on what roles the user wants to see.

>I think we all agree that having one list for all "album artists" and a
>second list for all "artists" is the right way to go.  do we all agree
>on that?  that is what several people, myself included, are asking for
>in this thread.
>
No, I disagree.  Some people want to include bands, others want to include 
composers.  Some want all artists, others want only album artists.  Having a 
separate list for each type of role doesn't solve the problem.  The problem 
isn't really the model for how artists are stored in the DB; the problem is 
really "how do people choose what they want to have displayed in a list of 
artists".

I agree that many people want to be able to browse just artists that feature on 
albums, and browse a list of all artists (where this would also include bands, 
conductors, composers, orchestras, track artists, etc).
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