Album Artist not stored in DB

[capnspacehook]

I've been using Navidrome for a few months now and haven't set it up to scrobble to anything, but luckily before I started using it Navidrome started tracking listens/scrobbles internally in its DB. I pulled the data out of Navidrome's DB and created a ListenBrainz zip file and imported it into Koito. It worked well overall, but I noticed that a bunch of my albums had the album artist labeled incorrectly.

I have many albums where the album artist is different than every artist for every track. For example if I have an album Foo where the album artist for each track is AA, and each track has different artists but they are never AA. It seems Koito picks the album/release's artist based on the first scrobble's artists from that album which isn't correct in my case.

It doesn't seem like album artists are differentiated from track artists from what I can tell, is this correct? I do see that Various Artists is handled separately but it'd be great if album artists were handled correctly and didn't require this exception.

I'm willing to look into this and submit a PR, but figured I would get your opinion on the matter first @gabehf, as I'm thinking this might be non-trivial unfortunately.

[gabehf]

Can you provide an example with a MusicBrainz link to a release that has an album artist that is different than any artist on any track? I haven't heard of this case before.

[capnspacehook]

Sure, here's one example: https://musicbrainz.org/release/7381fa3e-213d-42d2-b5df-aac5b4c6051c

Edit: Another example: https://musicbrainz.org/release/7a5be7a4-28e6-437e-a45e-eb548b56e8e8

Happens on soundtrack releases a lot.

[gabehf]

Interesting. It makes sense for soundtracks. The ListenBrainz API spec doesn't have a field for an album artist, so the only way that information to be filled in would be via a MusicBrainz release ID in the request. The implementation at first glance would be non-trivial so it's not something I'm going to tackle right now, but I'll keep it in mind for the future.

[capnspacehook]

If I wanted to tackle it though, the changes required would be:

• When handling a new album/release, use the MB release ID to lookup the release and get the album artist
  • Also actually use LbzAdditionalInfo.AlbumArtist if it's available, can skip the MB request
• Add artist to DB if necessary
• Update primary album artist

Does that sound right, would more need to be done?

[gabehf]

So there would be a few other considerations as well.

• Fetching album artist metadata and images.
• Fetching an artist or visiting the artist page of an artist who has no actual tracks but instead is only an album artist will return no listening statistics, as the DB implementation only counts listens to tracks that have the artist associated with the track itself.
• Truthfully the addl info albumartist field may not necessarily be correct, as I would imagine album_artist would be what is used, however the ListenBrainz API spec does not actually include an album artist field. My guess is I must have seen albumartist listed in a client I was testing, but I couldn't tell you which.
• Considerations would need to be made in regards to deleting and merging albums that have special album artists as the primary artist, as a lot of the DB implementation assumes that all artists that are associated with a release will also be associated with one of its tracks.

I wouldn't be able to come up with a solid implementation plan until later on, but for a change like this you would definitely need to familiarize yourself with the ins-and-outs of how the catalog AssociateXYZ functions work, the DB schema, and the actual SQLite calls that support the DB interface.

After some feature additions I have planned, I hope to take some time to actually clean up a lot of the codebase and complete some refactors that will make the whole thing easier to work with, which is why for something relatively in-depth like this, I would prefer to wait.

[ZackBoe]

I was looking for relevant issues/discussions and this seems like the most apt:

I've been thinking about running Koito as a replacement/alongside Maloja, so I was poking around your own instance after the 3.x release. Perhaps it's your metadata for the particular artists I'm familiar with, but I was hoping to see something similar to Maloja's 'Appears On' that distinguishes albums by others where the artist is featured on one or more tracks. I also have a number of albums that are listed under Various Artists which would fall under your considerations for artists with no tracks of their own.

Maloja screenshots

Koito screenshots