How is the displayed name for a MBID artist determined?

[garylaski]

For some reason LMS seems to choose some weird aliases as the primary display name in LMS.

I have 20 releases where the artist is credited as Yung Sherman (what is primary on MB), but for some reason LMS chooses the 1 release where the artist is credited as yungSherman and applies it to all releases.

I would expect LMS would display the credited name for its respective release, but link back to the standard/primary name for the artist when clicked on.

Not sure if this is a tagging issue.

[epoupon]

Hmmm, I have an idea on that, but could you please:

• try to run lms-metadata on some tracks of these releases and paste the result?
• paste some screenshots to better understand the situation?

[garylaski]

I expected if the artist used a secondary alias it would display that secondary alias on that release but still lead to the artist's primary alias, linked by the same MBID. However it seems that the artists display name carries over between releases, so aliases are not considered.

Output of lms-metadata on the 1 track where the artist is credited this way:
https://gist.github.com/Glask1/09dff081e5db3aaefae2334af3f53a25

Display name is determined from 1 release, not the primary name:

Releases that do not use this alias have that alias:

This is a trivial example where the only difference is spelling, but there are cases where an artist releases something as a different alias, yet is within the same artist ID.

[epoupon]

Thanks for these details.

Actually LMS displays the names found in ALBUMARTIST, ARTISTS and ARTIST fields (see lms-metadata output)
MBIDs are just used to link artists and releases from tracks. If several tracks point to the same artist MBID but using different artist name, the displayed name may be any of them, but it will be the same for all the tracks involved.
If another track points to the same artist name, but with no artist MBID, you will end up with two duplicate entries: one containing a unique MBID, and another one without MBID). This is done to handle name disambiguation.

In the track you dumped, you have:

[ALBUMARTIST] = babaStiltzSEPyungSherman
[ARTISTS] = babaStiltzSEPyungSherman
[MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID] = 0232892e-48a1-422f-ac3c-ee323e6ba9dfSEPb5569c04-93b5-44e9-bfcc-c4881dc4b5cb
[MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID] = 0232892e-48a1-422f-ac3c-ee323e6ba9dfSEPb5569c04-93b5-44e9-bfcc-c4881dc4b5cb

This means two different album artists and two different artists for this track are parsed:

• babaStiltz, with associated MBID 0232892e-48a1-422f-ac3c-ee323e6ba9df
• yungSherman, with associated MBID b5569c04-93b5-44e9-bfcc-c4881dc4b5cb
  I would say it is properly taggued, so the problem may come from you other releases?

[garylaski]

If several tracks point to the same artist MBID but using different artist name, the displayed name may be any of them, but it will be the same for all the tracks involved.

Thank you, this is exactly what I was trying to explain. Do you have any plans for the displayed name to be unique (not shared) for all tracks involved?

I would say it is properly tagged, so the problem may come from you other releases?

It's not a problem, it seems to be working as intended, just in a different way than I prefer. I can fix that by avoiding aliases from MB, and only tagging with the standardized artist name. That way the tracks that credit the artist with odd capitalization/spacing don't end up becoming the shared artist name for all tracks.

[epoupon]

Thank you, this is exactly what I was trying to explain. Do you have any plans for the displayed name to be unique (not shared) for all tracks involved?

Not at the moment, I will need to think about it but I am afraid it would require some significant changes.

[epoupon]

Feel free to open an issue to track this 👍