A track credited to more than one artist has exactly one navigable
artist in this app and the rest are punctuation. `primaryArtist()`
string-parses the credit, strips a " feat. " clause and discards the
guest; it deliberately does not split on "&", "with" or "," because
those live inside real artist names.
Measured on a real 26,069-file library plus an 80+80 MusicBrainz
sample: 13% of recordings are multi-artist upstream, while only 0.86%
of files carry any structured multi-artist tag — mp3 carries zero
files with multiple MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID across 19,840. Of 1,286 files
saying "feat.", 90% have nothing structured behind it, and a sample of
80 such files was multi-artist in MB 80 times out of 80.
CLAUDE.md justified plan 013's removal of the credit tables with "3
credits of 2,823 listed more than one artist". That measured our own
*writer* — cachedLinkArtist was called once per credit, so a
collaboration could never have been recorded. Dropping the join table
was still right on cost; the evidence for "multi-artist is rare" was
not.
A credit is ordered parts and the credit string is derived from them,
so join phrases are assembly instructions, not disassembly ones.
Nothing here reconstructs a credit by searching a name inside a credit
string: the stored text may come from tags while the parts come from
the catalog, and those disagree for ~1 in 3 multi-artist credits.
Where it comes from, after two dead ends: the canonical dump CI
already streams has no join phrases and no as-credited names, and the
JSON dumps cover 153,691 recordings of ~35M with *zero* overlap
against a real library. So mbdump.tar.bz2 — 7.1 GB, ~13.7 min in
pure-Go bzip2, whose members are alphabetical, which is what lets one
pass resolve an entity's credit without buffering 35M recordings.
- artist_credit_part / artist_credit_ref, multi-artist credits only:
a single-artist credit is already explore_index's own artist_name.
- Column layouts verified against the real 20260815 export;
ErrDumpShape makes a wrong guess a failed build, not a wrong catalog.
- The pass runs on every mode, not just a build. The job picks its mode
from the index's own state, and a complete import means "refresh",
which never enters the importer — so credits could otherwise only
arrive via a rebuild that re-downloads ~205 GB. It reports whether it
populated anything, which is what flips `changed` and republishes.
- The importer asks whether an artifact carries the tables, on the
writer where `core` is attached, so the artifact already published
still imports.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AfVYUVExXsx1nSWrXN8mAh
yonluandClaude Opus 5
b3737d30af