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View Full Version : How do I tag Various Artist CD rips for iTunes conversion and Asset Upnp



nibnis
09-10-2009, 12:48 PM
I have multiple artists happily tagged in the 'Artists' field and the primary Album Artist (singular) in 'Album Artists' - no problem.

Unfortunately, where I have Compilation CD's ripped by dBP the Album Artist tag I have entered the value "Various Artists" as to me this seems like a reasonable tag value for a compilation/group especially when the Artist tag contains the Artist of the specific song.

After a long discovery process (dBPoweramp rip followed by Mediamonkey/mp3tag to find out what was going wrong) I also discovered that I had a mixture of both 'ALBUMARTIST' and 'Album Artist' tags i.e. over the years I have ended up with the Album Artist sometimes in ALBUMARTIST; sometimes in Album Artist; and sometimes in both. This wasn't a problem for Asset upnp as I always had a full list of Album Artists but could never understand why I also had a significant number of tracks listed in [Unknown Album Artist] - hence I lived with it!

I only discovered a real pain in the btm when using dBP's Batch Conversion to Nero AAC (m4a) where I ended up with iTunes grouping sometimes numerous Album Artists for the same Album depending upon the populated tags described above - which was obviously not what I was expecting/wanted.

I have now used mp3tag to make sure that I only have the Album Artist tagged once in the 'Album Artist' tag. This now works a treat for iTunes conversions except............

In Asset upnp all the 'Album Artist' tags with the value "Various Artists" are showing up as [Unknown Album Artist]. I have doubled checked the number with mp3tag - result is 2331 tagged songs with "Various Artists" in the Album Artist tag talies with 2331 Unknown Album Artists songs reported in Asset upnp when browsing the Album Artist tree. Finally, my very simple question is....

Why should a value of "Various Artists" in the Album Artist tag be treated by Asset upnp as [Unknown Album Artist]? By the way, changing the value to "Various" seems to have no difference.

Any ideas why this is? Spoon is it my tagging or Asset not liking the value "Various Artists" in the Album Artist tag?

Apologies for the length of this post.