Combination of multi ARTIST tag and last.fm has a problem

[resiehnnes]

In the last days I had to reorganize ARTIST tag in songs which has multiple artists because it makes searching and filtering out particular artist and all of his songs and collaborations much more convenient and logical. Music players I use (Tauon, Poweramp) do support multi ARTIST tags which was another reason to do so, but there is a small problem:

Right now when a song has multiple artists in ARTIST tag and gets submitted to last.fm using built in scrobbler Tauon looks up for ALBUMARTIST tag and uses that value as an artist for the song. It works fine whenever first artist in multi ARTIST tag matches ALBUMARTIST. But if these two do not match scrobbled track is messed up.

After doing some testing I found out two occurrences when the problem pops out.

1. First artist in multi ARTIST tag does not match artist in ALBUMARTIST.

ARTIST: John & Martin\\John\\Martin
ALBUMARTIST: John
TITLE: Best Song

In this scenario Tauon uses ALBUMARTIST value as artist expecting that it will be same as first value in multi ARTIST which is not always true resulting in:

John - Best Song instead of John & Martin - Best Song

2. Second case is when ARTIST tag is multi and ALBUMARTIST has "Various Artists" value.

ARTIST: John & Martin\\John\\Martin
ALBUMARTIST: Various Artists
TITLE: Best Song

In this scenario Tauon uses full (raw) ARTIST tag where every artist is separated by ";" and submits to last.fm as:

John & Martin; John; Martin - Best Song

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Possible solution?

I don't know how reliable it will be, but my guess is that before submitting to last.fm a played song there should be a check if ARTIST tag is multi, if yes, always use first artist value and ignore the rest.

For the note, I am using Poweramp + Pano scrobbler on my smartphone and by default there was a problem as well, but I found a workaround which required a simple regex pattern edit added to Pano scrobbler (it has this feature) to let it submit to last.fm only first value (artist) if the song which is played has multi ARTIST tag. It has been discussed here.