Multiple "Artist" - i just want the first one!

Help
1

Hi,
Some songs in an album feature multiple artists. But my car’s mp3 player lists albums by artist. so if there is one song in the album that has a 2nd artist, it isn’t recognized as being part of the album!

e.g… in the song below, it is’t included with the album because it appears to be by a different artist to the car’s system.
albumartist: LeAnn Rimes
albumartist_credit: LeAnn Rimes
albumartist_sort: Rimes, LeAnn
artist: LeAnn Rimes duet with Eddy Arnold
artist_credit: LeAnn Rimes duet with Eddy Arnold
mb_albumartistid: 9092d8e1-9b38-4372-a96d-000b8561a8bc
mb_artistid: 9092d8e1-9b38-4372-a96d-000b8561a8bc

So how does one configure beets such that only 1 artist is used for the entire album? is there a feature whereby we can say just to list the first artist?

thank you!

2

We don’t currently have an option for that; sorry! You might be interested in this proposal:

3

Apparently, your car can’t distinguish between artist and album artist. I have the same issue, but I don’t blame beets: it does what it should, i.e. tag music with metadata from MusicBrainz. Try tagging your music with Discogs. I think they put featured artists in the title, so your albums won’t get split.

4

Its a 2013 BMW X3. Apparently it is using the “artist” tag instead of “albumartist” or “albumartist_sort”… which i guess i can also understand the confusion. No blame for anyone. I think the answer is, as suggested above, the ability to template out the tagging fields such as artist. It seems like people have many other uses for it as well.

6

i solved this with
item_fields:
first_artist: albumartist.split(', ',1)[0:1][0]

because, almost every time, the first artist in the albumartist field is the “primary” artist.