I recently just started saving the music I enjoy locally on my computer. I had a general idea of the music I liked, but never really compiled it into a collection before, and doing such has definitely been helping me better connect with the things I enjoy.

While things have overall been going well, there's this really annoying issue I've been having with MusicBee that on a cursory glance appears to be the same case with most other music players. Whenever I have a release with multiple album artists, namely with singles, MusicBee creates a new album artist entry marking the group of artists as a single artist entity.

To preface, the releases in question differ from "Various Artists" releases in that they usually have two artists collaborating on one track, or are tracks where a main artist guest features other artists. For example, I have a single titled "Search & Destroy" by "DJKurara & Supire", and instead of listing the release under the discographies of both DJKurara and Supire, it instead creates a new artist entry titled "DJKurara & Supire", which messes up the organisation of albums. Another example is a track I have called "FriendZoned" by "S3RL feat. Mixie Moon & MC Offside", where the album is organised under a new album artist entry of "S3RL feat. Mixie Moon & MC Offside", essentially treating the three working together as a new artist entirely, preventing it from being listed in S3RL's discography.

According to the fourth comment on the MusicBee forums here, this behaviour is intentional... which is hard for me to wrap my mind around. Is there any music library/player software where I can get these releases to sort properly where a release appears in the libraries of both musicians rather than an album artist entry separate from both? I'd prefer one where I don't need to edit the tags of the tracks, as I like keeping the tags as accurate as possible via MusicBrainz Picard, but this isn't an absolute requirement as I just want to keep my list of artists accurate.

Thanks in advance.

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[–] SolarPunker@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Edit your tags. There isn't a perfection solution out of the box for audiophiles, Picard is the best to start but it can miss details, also I suggest QuodLibet as a player since is highly customizable. Auxio on mobile is the one I tolerate more at the moment.

[–] Binzy_Boi@feddit.online 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Thanks a million. I had it installed before doing this, but got rid of it disliking the default look. Just reinstalled it and dabbled a bit and found out how to arrange it in a way that's pleasing to me.

While I still need to sort out the album artist issue, it's not nearly as much of a pain in Quod Libet as it was in MusicBee. Looks appealing and organised, which is what I was mostly worried about.

Here's screenshot I took of how things look currently.

[–] SolarPunker@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 weeks ago

You're welcome; there's an option to not show "various artists" and also to only show the album-artist, the docs in the official site are good.

[–] theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

If you don't have a big collection start Editting your tags now!

I went through my music collection more recently and sanitising tags on 30k+ tracks took me fucking weeks!

[–] Binzy_Boi@feddit.online 1 points 3 weeks ago

Been on top of it today. Used to adding releases to MusicBrainz, so thankfully the releases that didn't have entries there for me to refer to with Picard, I just added them myself to their database with the proper metadata and had Picard refer to those.