Alias Role separation on Discographies

[Secret Squirrel]

Based on a suggestion by Cedile and Revoc, I've made a change on the artist discographies. Now, aliases are separated by role instead of just by album. This is mostly important for albums where an artist uses multiple aliases for different roles (or sometimes even the same roles, like on many Bemani albums).

This turned out to be more of a challenge than I thought, so please report any unusual or unexpected behavior.

Also, this might make some credits a little verbose, particularly if an artist with a lengthy alias has 4 roles on an album. If you find such a discography, please post the link here so that we can see if we need to make some adjustments.

[Cedille]

Really good work. Thanks.

One thing though, I'm not sure if it still works when one artist and his/her alias has credits for the same role. I know nothing about Bemani, but here are the two albums that come to my mind (for that matter, neither of them seems to be based on the official booklet, I think).

http://vgmdb.net/album/256
http://vgmdb.net/album/15861 (credits based on the official store).

I think it would ideally show up like Composer (as Kinuyo Yamashita, Minakuchi Engineering Staff) or Composer (also as Minakuchi Engineering Staff) in the artist page.

[Secret Squirrel]

You're right. I need to figure out how to do that.

EDIT -- Done.

[Ira]

Ah~ I had been wanting this as well. Also lists their name (for applicable albums) too, that always bugged me that it didn't. Nice stuff.

Edit: Here's a few rather verbose discogs (incidentally all bemani artists, who's surprised?)
http://vgmdb.net/artist/240
http://vgmdb.net/artist/1804
http://vgmdb.net/artist/2781
http://vgmdb.net/artist/2637
http://vgmdb.net/artist/2072

[Kaleb.G]

SS, this looks good!

Also, I wanted to mention the discussion about aliases going on over in the Ogeretsu Kun thread:
http://vgmdb.net/forums/showthread.p...5724#post15724

I don't know exactly what Blah's ideas are for a single unified artist page though.

EDIT:
Actually, it would be nice if biographies and photos propagated to and from the artist/alias pages, or at least from the aliases to the main artist page.

[Ira]

Originally Posted by Kaleb.G

...

Agreed on most accounts. Though, an option to toggle use of aliases seems kind of pointless to me, and it would look bad on albums where an artist uses multiple aliases. I guess to remedy this you could add some sort of aliases and artists-using-aliases spans that could be toggled between, which is similar to what is done for names (or you could repopulate the fields through some sort of ajax trickery, or just make people refresh.)

With regards to unifying artist pages...

Originally Posted by Gigablah

Alias filtering is being planned for discography pages, but in any case the main reason we have alias entries right now is to record information beyond the alias name (such as Japanese names, website, etc). Currently, if you link an album to an artist using only a text alias (without making a separate entry for the alias), you can't add additional languages for the alias name.

A way to solve this is to decouple artist name fields from the artist table (and make a general table for name translations). But that will come after we do the same for the track/tracklist table.

And since we're talking about names, it'd be nice to see some way of overriding the use of original names on album credits, there's artists who are sometimes credited by their romanized name (and some only by that name.) This has been bugging me forever.

[Revoc]

Originally Posted by Kaleb.G

EDIT:
Actually, it would be nice if biographies and photos propagated to and from the artist/alias pages, or at least from the aliases to the main artist page.

I already think about this too, but it would be nice if it was optional, not obligatory. In some cases the alias are actually the characters voiced / interpreted by the artists and it's interesting a different picture and biography.

Some examples:
Mami Kingetsu / Shiori Fujisaki
Hiroshi Fujioka / Sanshiro Segata