Artist vs. AlbumArtist

[simoncn]

(15-08-2012 14:17)winxi Wrote:  Hi,

the MinimServer project has motivated me to revise the tagging of my music collection. Until now I haven't really cared about the AlbumArtist tag. I've read the MinimServer user guide and i now understand how the Artist and the AlbumArtist tags affect the appearance of the Artist and the All Artists index entries.

However, i don't fully get the point of the differences between the Artist and the AlbumArtist tags. Can somebody shortly explain there use in different cases?

Scenario 1:
There is a usual album containing just one artist (lets say Sting). Basically, there are 3 possibilities to tag Artist and AlbumArtist:
a) Write Sting to AlbumArtist only
b) Write Sting to Artist only
c) Write Sting to both Artist and AlbumArtist
From my understanding, possibility a) is not the best solution and possibilities b) and c) make no difference for the appearance in MinimServer. How should this be made and is there some kind of standard for tagging Artist and AlbumArtist?

This depends on which combination of the Artist / All Artists / AlbumArtist indexes you want to use to browse your colection.

1) If you want to use Artist, you can do either b) or c). They are equivalent, because MinimServer will automatically use the AlbumArtist tag value in the Artist index if the AlbumArtist tag is populated, and will use the Artist tag value otherwise.

2) If you want to use All Artists, you can do either b) or c). They are equivalent, because MinimServer won't use the AlbumArtist tag value in the All Artists index.

3) If you want to use AlbumArtist, you can do either a) or c). Using a) may cause problems with displaying artist information in the control point, because MinimServer doesn't currently send AlbumArtist information to the control point for individual tracks. This will change in a future release of MinimServer, but you might still have problems depending on how your control point handles this information.

Quote:Scenario 2:
Consider a compilation (e.g. a soundtrack) with titles from different artists. What i do now is to write the corresponding artist for each track to the Artist tag and the AlbumArtist tag will become 'Various Artists'. Doing this, 'Various Artists' will appear under the Artist index entry in MinimServer, which is somewhat not intended. Should i leave AlbumArtist empty for compilations? Is there 'the right way' to do it?

cheers, winxi

If you leave AlbumArtist empty, MinimServer will generate an Artist index entry by combining the Artist tag information for all the tracks of your compilation album, and it will send this value to the control point as the artist for the album. This might be a very long string! It's probably better to create an AlbumArtist tag with the value you want to appear in the Artist index and the control point.