beetcamp determines wrong artist for album https://carriez.bandcamp.com/album/satie-complete-piano-works-volume-10

[mkhl]

~/.local/pipx/venvs/beets/bin/beetcamp https://carriez.bandcamp.com/album/sati e-complete-piano-works-volume-10

determines the artist as "Psaumes (1895), Satie: Complete Piano Works".
Each title gets assigned either "Satie: Complete Piano Works" or "Psaumes (1895)", which I guess results in this combined artist.
The actual artist as given in the included json-ld is "carrie z".

[snejus]

Again, thanks for reporting this! Unfortunately, beetcamp is mostly tested with electronic music albums, so issues with classical music do not get caught 🤔 . I'll see what I can do here

[snejus]

This album is a very interesting case to analyse, again thanks for sharing it!

What makes it interesting is that there are two track naming formats being followed, for example

1. Prélude en tapisserie (1906)
2. Psaumes (1895) - 1. Losing Grip

@mkhl I'd like to hear your thoughts regarding artist attribution here: would it be acceptable to set carrie z as the artist in both cases?

I've already adjusted the algorithm to treat carrie z as a legitimate artist, and she's set as the artist for tracks 1, 6, 10, 14 and 19 (every track which does not start with Psaumes (1895)).

At this point Psaumes (1895) is still being treated as an artist, therefore we still have Psaumes (1895), carrie z in the albumartist field. I'm now thinking about adding a track artist field rule which overrides Psaumes (1895) with carrie z in this one and similar cases.

I'd like to hear your thoughts whether that's an acceptable approach to go ahead with 🙂

[mkhl]

Yes I think overriding the artist to be "carrie z" would make sense in this case and others I've encountered.

"Psaumes (1895)" would identify the collection of work the piece is from (unfortunately they were lost but carrie reconstructed them: “The reconstruction of the latter consists of a cover of the album "Let Go" by Avril Lavigne, published in 2002, in its entirety.”), all of the music was played and recorded by carrie z.

[mkhl]

Other wrong artists that I found and that seem similar to this are

• https://aurensnyder.bandcamp.com/album/normal-music-volume-ii
  in track 4, 4'33" is identified as an artist, but it's just part of the track name
• https://wolf359radio.bandcamp.com/album/wolf-359-soundtrack-vol-3-2
  again there's a dash in the track name, in this case "I'm Sure It's Fine" in track 13
• https://wolf359radio.bandcamp.com/album/wolf-359-soundtrack-vol-1
  same thing, this time "You Can't Seriously Be Reporting Me to HS for That" in track 13

[mkhl]

Another instance: https://katzonlatevach.bandcamp.com/album/like-lambs-to-the-slaughter
Each track has its title listed in both English and Hebrew, separated by -, but beetcamp interprets the english titles as artist names.

[snejus]

Cool, thanks for this! I'll use these for testing!

[mkhl]

I've been thinking about this more and to me the root problem seems to be that some compilations are properly tagged (https://wicrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/katana-zero-original-soundtrack has a byArtist on every track) while some aren't (https://blackmetalrainbows.bandcamp.com/album/black-metal-rainbows doesn't have any byArtist on tracks).

Would it make sense to offer both variants? Like, if no tracks have byArtist tags, but some titles contain a dashes, we could offer one version with the "root" artist where the dashes are just part of the track title, and another "various artists" version where we parse track artists from track titles?

[snejus]

Sorry for a big delay getting back to you here.

Would it make sense to offer both variants? Like, if no tracks have byArtist tags, but some titles contain a dashes, we could offer one version with the "root" artist where the dashes are just part of the track title, and another "various artists" version where we parse track artists from track titles?

This is a very interesting idea! The way the plugin returns multiple albums for each release format, it could do something similar here for releases that have ambiguous artists such as the ones you linked.