Currently, Banshee does not handle multiple artists of a single song or album very well. For ID3v2, the standard separator is the forward slash (/). Banshee appears to recognize this for fields containing multiple values, but for some odd reason insists on changing the field from "Foo/Bar" to "Foo; Bar". If Banshee is configured to write metadata to files, the forward slash is removed there as well, meaning it no longer follows this standard. While this may be considered by some to be more aesthetically pleasing, this behavior should at least be configurable.

The main feature I'm requesting is support for multiple artists within the artists pain of Banshee's interface. Right now, if a song's ID3v2 tag has a value of "Foo/Bar/Baz" for the artist field and another song has a value of "Foo" for the artist, the artist pain in the interface will show two artists, one being "Foo" and the other being "Foo/Bar/Baz". I think this should instead result in the pain displaying three individual artists: "Foo", "Bar", and "Baz". Selecting "Foo" should show both songs, since "Foo" is an artist of both. Selecting "Bar" or "Baz" should only display the song for which all three were the artists.

This is very problematic for compilation albums with many artists doing many collaborations, and I end up with a massive and inconsistent artists pain with all kinds of entries like, "Foo; Bar; Qux", "Bar; Baz", and "Foo; Baz; Qux". But what if I just want all songs by "Foo"? Only songs done soley by "Foo" appear. I think this is counterintuitive.

The same problem affects compilation albums as well, where the album has multiple artists. If a compilation album's artist field is given as "Foo/Bar" and I select the artist "Foo" in the artists pain, the album will not appear, despite "Foo" being an artist of that album.

I think to help solve these problems, Banshee should adopt the forward slash (/) as the standard delimiter. Also, it should list artists individually in the artists pain, parsing artist fields with multiple entries. Additionally, compilation albums should also allow multiple artists to be encoded (using the forward slash delimiter), and should appear when any matching set of artists are selected in the artists pain. Finally, for cleaner display, Banshee should allow users to select a style for displaying multiple artists of a track/song or album. For example, when a song is playing, it may say, "... by Foo, Bar, and Baz from ..." or, "... by Foo; Bar; Baz from ..." It should be the user's preference.

Just a note, but I'm aware other tagging systems allow you to simply add multiple tags of the same type (e.g., OGG allows users to simply add multiple [artist] tags). Ideally, this should also be supported, and should be seamless, possibly appearing as a single field delimited by slashes in the track editor.

Thanks!