Subsonic API and multi-value tags

[jmbannon]

Hello, quick question: how does the subsonic api layer handle multi-value tags? I.E. suppose I have the Eric Clapton + BB King album Riding with the King with each artist as a value in albumartists, what does it look like through subsonic?

And similarly, would the same apply to a multi-valued mood or genre tags?

[epoupon]

Hello,

For an album, LMS will concatenate the names of the albumartists (fallback on artists if it is not set), using a comma separator, but won't set the artistId field if there are multiple artists.

For mood, there is no way to retrieve it using this API.
For genre, only the first one is reported (not sure why it is not concatenated like artists though)

[jmbannon]

@epoupon thanks for the quick response! Forgot that subsonic doesn't support mood.

Would it be possible to make it so all tracks with a certain albumartist/genre get returned when choosing a single albumartist/genre value? Or is there a limitation in the subsonic api that prevents this?

[epoupon]

Well the Subsonic API can list the genres of your collection, and can even list the albums that match a genre.
But AFAIK it cannot get the artists that match this genre.
By default LMS lists all the artists involved in your collection (even composers, remixers, etc.) but there is an option to only list track or album artists.

Note that all this is possible with the regular LMS web interface.

[Bomfunk]

Hello,
Would it be possible to add a setting which allows to not concatenate the names of the artists through Subsonic API, but only output the first artist? The reason I'd like this is because I'm scrobbling to last.fm, and I'm trying to keep the scrobbles clean - last.fm doesn't recognize comma-separated artists.
Thank you in advance.

[epoupon]

Hello!
Yes this can be done. You use a subsonic client that does not scrobble using the subsonic api?

[Bomfunk]

Thank you for your reply.
I use DSub, I think it can scrobble through Subsonic API. However, if I understand correctly, LMS itself can only scrobble to ListenBrainz, which I do not use. I usually use external scrobbler on my Android as I sometimes use other music players also.
Perhaps I'd gladly switch to scrobbling through Subsonic API if LMS supported last.fm.

I like the way the API returns albums in which the selected artist is participating, not only those where they are the main/album artist of - I think it should be possible to output the first artist only and not break this functionality still?

[epoupon]

Yes indeed, will consider adding an option for it.
By the way, there is an initiative to extend the Subsonic API (see https://github.com/opensubsonic/open-subsonic-api)
Unfortunately, DSub is not part of it but some other interesting alternatives are.

[Bomfunk]

Meanwhile, I resolved this differently so I no longer have this problem anyway. Perhaps someone might find this solution useful, so here it is:
PanoScrobbler for Android has functionality of automatically editing the tags with regex before scrobbling to last.fm. I did a similar thing to what was described here https://www.reddit.com/r/lastfm/comments/ytenz0/panoscrobbler_pattern_edits_i_made_for_myself/
And now commas in the artist names simply don't make it to last.fm.