How to force display of composer rather than performer

ajb59

Investigating using Zotero to catalogue audio recordings I find that 'Composer' is not displayed in the Creator field if 'Performer' is also present; this corresponds to the practice of not displaying 'Editor', etc., in other item categories if 'Author' is also present. (This is not affected by the display order in the right-hand panel Creator field, i.e. whether 'Composer' or 'Performer' is at the top of the list is irrelevant.)

However, this behaviour is neither intuitive nor very useful in the context of classical music where the natural hierarchy is composer before performer, arranger, librettist, etc.

So, please, is there a way to force the display of a particular creator type in the central panel and to override the default precedence?

adamsmith

sorry, not possible. I see why it might be useful, but it's at a minimum not easy to implement in a way that wouldn't also be confusing, so I don't see this happening anytime soon.

jens-solvang

Using Zotero to document audiobooks, it is still annoying to use performer (author) and composer (the reader of the book) to make the autor show up in the creator-field. I hope that it will be possible soon.

rusodepaso

With audiobooks becoming more and more common, I am surprised there are so few comments on the options that Zotero has for them. I realize it is not a priority but still, it would be great if the issues brought up above got addressed in future versions, or at least the latter one, by jens-solvang.

bwiernik

You would not use composer for the author of the book. Enter an audiobook as a Book. Enter the author as the author. A Narrator creator variable is available in CSL 1.0.2, which Zotero will adopt in a future version. For now, entering Narrator: Last || First in Extra is an option. You can edit the citation style to include the narrator in citations—Zotero will warn that it isn’t a valid style when you try to install it, but I think it should work.

rusodepaso

bwiernik, appreciate your response, as well as the information that Zotero is going to adopt CSL 1.0.2 with a narrator creator variable.

As for the rest, yes, there is always an option to use Extra or some other searchable field, and that is what I call a workaround.

When it comes to editing citation styles, most Zotero users don't know how to do it, and don't want to learn to. So again, it may be a workaround for some users, but not a solution to this issue.