Overwriting [Artist] with "OST" when CD is a soundtrack.

[dontpanic42]

Greetings oh mighty dbpoweramp gurus,

I have had a fairly extensive look through these forums but I can't seem to find what I am looking for.
I am currently ripping all my CDs to FLAC and have been trying to figure out a way to fulfil my unique Soundtrack naming/sorting needs.
If I have a Soundtrack CD (or compilation CD for the matter), I want the entire CD to be sorted under the Artist "OST" (i.e. Original Sound Track), in both the folder structure and in the individual file tag.

e.g.
Artist=OST
Album=Trainspotting

to end up with a folder structure of:
[Artist] – [Album]\[Track] – [Title]

which would end up as…..
“OST – Trainspotting\01 – Iggy Pop – Lust For Life.flac”

Simply put, if a movie soundtrack CD has various artists for each track, I want the artist for each track to be overwritten with "OST".

Furthermore, if a soundtrack CD has various artists, I would like each track artist to be transplanted into the track title before the track artist is overwritten with OST.

e.g. (usual metadata from internet)
Artist= Various
Album=Trainspotting
Track=Lust For Life
Track Artist=Iggy Pop

I want the tags to end up as:
Artist=OST
Album=Trainspotting
Track=Iggy Pop – Lust For Life

and the folder structure would end up as:
OST – Trainspotting\01 – Iggy Pop – Lust For Life.flac
i.e.
[Artist] – [Album]\[Track] – [Title]

If anyone has any ideas, I would greatly appreciate it!!

Many Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to respond :smile2:

[Spoon]

Re: Overwriting [Artist] with "OST" when CD is a soundtrack.

In CD Ripper manually type the artist as any value you wish.

[dontpanic42]

Re: Overwriting [Artist] with "OST" when CD is a soundtrack.

In CD Ripper manually type the artist as any value you wish.

Hi Spoon,

Thanks for your reply.

That's what I am doing currently, but it overrides each unique track artist when it is a soundtrack consisting of various artists.
Because of the nature of soundtracks having multiple artists, I would love to have each unique track artist be transplanted into each individual track title before the overall artist field is overridden with 'OST'.

Is this possible?

Thanks again.

[Spoon]

Re: Overwriting [Artist] with "OST" when CD is a soundtrack.

You are best leaving the individual artist names as is, then set the Album Artist to OST. Better yet, why not use the Genre as OST?

[BrodyBoy]

Re: Overwriting [Artist] with "OST" when CD is a soundtrack.

Are you really sure you want the artist's name to be in the in the title itself? That will make for some very cumbersome song titles (think Dark Knight: "Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard" at the beginning of every track title!)...which will be awkward to read on the myopic displays of most music players.

Depending on what player you use and how they recognize/handle tags, you might consider using multiple artist tags:

ARTIST=Iggy Pop
ARTIST=OST

Another more "elegant" approach, IMO, is to use the ALBUMARTIST tag for your "OST" label. I assume you have been putting OST in the artist field as an easy way to search for soundtracks in your music library, via the ARTIST tag. ALBUMARTIST can work the same way in most players, while retaining the actual artist information in its proper field. Or conversely, you could map the actual artist name to ALBUMARTIST and then set the ARTIST tag to "OST."

You mentioned that you want a particular folder scheme for your soundtracks as well. As a general rule, I find it much easier to just create a separate profile in dBpoweramp for each of these broad categories of albums.....Soundtracks, Compilations, etc. This way, the naming scheme, folder organization, and ID Tag Processing can all be customized just for that kind of album, without having to write a bunch of complicated conditional strings and without concerns that I'll inadvertently impact other kinds of albums in unexpected ways.

[dontpanic42]

Re: Overwriting [Artist] with "OST" when CD is a soundtrack.

Some good ideas there. Thanks for the input guys. Appreciated.

I guess the reason why I wanted to do it in the way described is mainly because of the way my mp3 player handles the tags. Was just curious to find out if there was an automated way of doing it.
But I will certainly give the Album Artist trick a go, and see how my portable mp3 player handles that schema. I'm sure I can find a way to make it work.

Once again, thanks heaps.