Navidrome: Support multiple releases of the same album

[vs49688]

Many albums have slightly different variants depending on where (and when) they're released.
Case-in-point:

$ ls -1
'Oceanborn [74321 70359 2]'
'Oceanborn [SPI67CD]'
'Oceanborn [SPI67SP]'
'Oceanborn [TFCK-87179]'
'Oceanborn [UICN-15002]'

Currently Navidrome merges these under the same album in the Web UI (see attached image). Would it be possible to disambiguate these somehow? I'm not sure if there's any MusicBrainz integration, but perhaps songs could be grouped by the embedded "MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID" tag (if it exists) as well as the album name itself?

[deluan]

This has been discussed in our Discord server, and it's been in my head for some time now, but we didn't have a issue to track it. Thanks for opening it.

After the integration with TagLib (#480) is complete, I'll be able to start working on improvements in the scanner, including more tags and multi-valued tags, and will probably be tackling this then

[deluan]

By the way, what I currently do in my own library in these cases is to add a disambiguation qualifier in the name itself, like:

$ ls -1d L.*
L.A. Woman
L.A. Woman (40th Anniversary Mixes)

I understand this is not ideal for some people, but I personally prefer to clearly see the disambiguation, as sometimes even the cover art for the albums are the same.

[vs49688]

I used to do that, but my library is now at the scale where needs to be managed by beets, so that won't work unfortunately.

[deluan]

Well, I also use beets and I do a beet mod -a album="name" when this disambiguation is required at the moment I add the new album. But my library is only ~4500K albums, I know that some people out there has waaaay more than this :)

Anyway, besides using the MBIDs to disambiguate the albums, do you have any suggestion on how to make them visible distinct in the UI (if the cover art happens to be the same)?

[vs49688]

Huh, I didn't know about beet mod. I'll look into it.

Personally, I'd be fine with an extra (YEAR),(COUNTRY), (LABEL) or (CAT) string appended to the album name (or some combination thereof), similar to what Beets does,

Album Name (2003, XW)
Album Name (2005, DE)

If some fields don't exist, then try others, before finally falling back to MBID. e.g, unlikey worst case scenario, in which case someone should submit an edit to MusicBrainz and retag:

Album Name (2003, XW, 7a606fec-9677-4632-890b-5f307005d729)
Album Name (2003, XW, 83c3801f-843e-4787-aa14-6e1c911e49c0)

Or just spit a warning in this situation and retain the current behaviour.

In my beet.cfg, I've got it using:

$albumartist/$album%aunique{albumartist album, albumtype year country catalognum label albumdisambig mb_albumid}/$track $title

So it'll first attempt to disambiguate based on type, then year, then country, etc.

If you wanted to be extra fancy, perhaps some kind of overlay on the album art in the bottom corner:

______________    ______________
|            |    |            |
|            |    |            |
|            |    |            |
|            |    |            |
|       2003 |    |       2005 |
--------------    --------------