Artist vs. AlbumArtist

[Briain]

(15-08-2012 14:17)winxi Wrote:  c) Write Sting to both Artist and AlbumArtist

Hi, C is the best option where AlbumArtist and Artist are the same (like Sting, or Pink Floyd, etc).

I have a lot of compilations and I use a single AlbumArtist entry for every album I have. What that means is that I now use AlbumArtist to navigate to my music about 99.999% of the time. The only time I'd use artist would be to find a contributing artist on one of the compilations. As I had to create these new AlbumArtist tags from nothing, I took the opportunity to use 'Surname, Fist Names' format for the AlbumArtist tags, but I just left all the artist ones as they come from the www (i.e. from Freedb etc).

Examples would be as below:

Single Artist Album:

AlbumArtist=Pink Floyd
Artist=Pink Floyd
Artist=Pink Floyd
Artist=Pink Floyd

Single Artist Album:

AlbumArtist=Bowie, David
Artist=David Bowie
Artist=David Bowie
Artist=David Bowie

Compilation Album:

AlbumArtist=Peel, John
Album=Right Time, Wrong Speed (Disc 1)
Artist=Buzzcocks
Artist=Stiff Little Fingers
Artist=The Cure

Compilation album:

AlbumArtist=Blue Note Sampler
Album=Blue Note Sampler
Artist=John Doe
Album=Noisy Bugger
Album=Betty Bazookas

(The above is a made up example where it might be sensible to leave the AlbumArtist the same as the Album name; it might be the most logical one to look for if you wanted to play that album.)

When I first did all this and discovered the AlbumArtist value, I configured MP3TAG to have an action which populates AlbumArtist with artist, then selected all my non-compilations and ran it (so that was things like Pink Floyd and David Bowie sorted).

I then selected all the compilations and used a different 'guess action' to populate all the AlbumArtist values with the album names. That meant the whole issue was usable after these two automated actions. My reasoning behind doing that with the compilations was that for albums like 'Ibiza Chillout Album', I'd rather have that as the AlbumArtist than just 'Various' (and it was only a temporary measure until I got round to manually re-tagging each album; as described below).

I then spent ages - at my leisure - working through all the compilations and rewriting the AlbumArtist values with the ones that I actually wanted (so that's when I populated the above with 'Peel, John'. Once that was done, I looked at all the single artist albums (like Pink Floyd and David Bowie) and renamed the ones with an artist name to the Surname, Firstname format (so that's when I changed David Bowie to Bowie, David).

I have never changed any artist values as that's what scrolls across the media player screen when it's playing (and I'd rather see it as 'David Bowie').

Bri