I've finally started configuring my 0.9 installation, and I'm finding the new album artist parsing frustrating. I've always used the existence of the ALBUM ARTIST field to indicate that ARTIST varies from the album default for that track. Long story short, [%album artist%] returns %artist% even when ALBUM ARTIST doesn't exist, and requires me to drop back to $if($not($strcmp($meta(album artist),)),%album artist%) for the same effect. This is rather frustrating and unintuitive.

I'm aware that the developers are leery of allowing users to alter the translation layer or whatever you want to call the code that does this behind the scenes. This is rather annoying though. I would really like to be able to alter elements of the translation layer. It would allow me to do things that I've wanted to do for a while, like pull version information (like remix name) out of TITLE for searching and organizational purposes, while still allowing simply using %title% to refer to the whole thing.

Again, it's not a huge deal, nor a huge request, I just find the 0.9 method frustrating and unintuitive for the ALBUM ARTIST special case. It would be very handy if there was some way to give the user control of this translation layer, especially when it makes special-case headaches like this.

If you want to access only ALBUM ARTIST you should use $meta(album artist)

In fact I find the new way way better. I don't have to do $if(blaaa, blaaa blaaa) to dig the ALBUM ARTIST is it exists. I just use %album artist% on the artist columns and if the track has album artist I use $if($meta(album artist),%artist% '/' ,)[%title%] for the title, so I can show in front the "real artist"

What about %track artist%?

The translation layer is implemented in C++; there are no plans to change that.

Well, that simplifies it down to $if(%track artist%,%album artist%). Thanks for the help foosion.

Nonetheless, the fact that this is a special case that needs to be explicitly coded around is a little irritating, especially when [%album artist%] worked so well for so long. Then again, I've got a pathological dislike of special cases. Maybe I'll just change the field name over to ALB ARTIST or something to get around this.

It's too bad that there are no plans to make it configurable, but I suppose I understand the sort of situation it would create. Another mostly useless preferences page, right?

I understand your point, DotNoir, but it doesn't change the situation that I presented. I agree that the remapping works well for what it was intended to do, namely simplifying formatting strings of low complexity. (Hm, $if($meta(album artist),blah) is equivalent to $if($strcmp($meta(album artist),),blah)? Tagz is fun. )

Cool that works. I've been trying to figure out why it keeps displaying artist name in the album artist slot even when there's no album artist tag. (i listen to a lot of compilation which makes album artist tag very useful)

Thanks again.