Featured artists

[PedroT99]

I'm curious what people are doing with featured artists...and a few related tech questions.

On a few albums, there have been duets, a featured artist here and there and I have included it in the song/track/file name. Ex. Moby\Play\05 Moby - South Side (feat. Gwen Stefani).flac

I figured if the artist felt the need to give the featured artist cover credit, it was part of the song. When it is one song here or there, it is not intrusive. I'm done with my "regular" music and just started on my rap. Holy crap....I never realized how many featured artists are listed on rap albums. Every song...and every file name is huge. Now I'm rethinking my approach to put these artists in the file name/track name.

It seems like my options are to...
- just rip with the artists in the track/file names
- not do that and add to the track name after via tags so that the file name is just the song but the track name is as the artist put on the album cover
- do neither of the above and add featured artists to the artist tags.

I know I can do whatever I want but I'm curious what other people do...and what is the generally accepted standard if there is one.

Also, when I did a test rip not adding to the track and simply adding the featured artists to the individual artist tags, I noticed that winamp didn't display the other artists...just the main artist. iTunes on the other hand did show all artists. Is there a setting or does Winamp not show it?

[garym]

Re: Featured artists

I do a combination. When I have an album that has several tracks by artists I'm interested in, I go to the trouble to make that a multiple ARTIST tag. For example, for a "7 Walkers" CD, there is a track that also has Willie Nelson. So for that track, I have TWO ARTIST fields (7 Walkers and Willie Nelson). So this track shows up under either artist in my player database. In other cases where I'm less interested (and this is particularly true of my hip hop stuff), I leave it in the track title with "feat. XXXX". A third thing I do is to put some info in the COMMENT field (typically stuff about the song that is less than featured artists....I do this a lot with my live concert stuff (e.g., comment tag in a Grateful Dead song has info that says: Duane Allman playing on song.

[PedroT99]

Re: Featured artists

That makes sense. What I have been doing is if the album has one or two featured artists meaning they really are featured on the album, I am putting them in the file names to make them more prominent. If they seemingly have a guest (or multiple guests) on every song, I'm just putting it in the artist tags in dBp where you can enter metadata with the 4 perfect meta providers. That is the right place to enter those artists right? Click on the checkbox to open the info for each song on that page? It has a place for individual title, artist and compser. Seperated by semicolons?

While I'm in th topic...and this isn't a dBp question although maybe I am putting the tags into dBp wrong....
I noticed that when I import my flacs ripped that way into Winamp, none of the featured artists show up, just the main one. When I convert to mp3 and import to iTunes, they are there. In Winamp (which is the player I decided on...for now), if I right click on the track and go to file info the other artists are there under the advanced tab but not in the music library or the currently playing song?

Either I'm tagging incorrectly when I rip, I have a setting wrong in Winamp or Winamp just doesn't show secondary or tertiary artists....which seems odd.

Any ideas? If it is a Winamp question, I'll repost in Hydrogen but I posted here as I thought perhaps I'm entering the metadata incorrectly pre-rip. I can't imagine a player as seemingly evolved as Winamp wouldn't shown other artists and I feel like I went through every option.

Thanks!

[PedroT99]

Re: Featured artists

Garym (or anyone else),
One other thing....when you do put the featured artist in the song title, do you rip it that way or do you rip just the song name and then change the title to include (feat. XYZ) by editing the tag? I only ask because when ripped the first way some of the file names get really long (not that it matters i suppose) but I haven't yet started playing with editing tags. The tags are more or less going the same way as I rip the albums. Does it even matter?

Thanks!

[garym]

Re: Featured artists

Garym (or anyone else),
One other thing....when you do put the featured artist in the song title, do you rip it that way or do you rip just the song name and then change the title to include (feat. XYZ) by editing the tag? I only ask because when ripped the first way some of the file names get really long (not that it matters i suppose) but I haven't yet started playing with editing tags. The tags are more or less going the same way as I rip the albums. Does it even matter?

Thanks!

I don't have that many "feat. xxxx" in titles. I probably lean toward putting 2nd and 3rd artists in separate artists fields in the tags, then using ALBUM ARTIST overall. This way these featured artists do show up in any search I do in my data base on the ARTIST info. Again, file names are sorta irrelevant. I'd prefer not to have these too long and containing all these (feat. XXX) info in the file name itself. So one thing you can do is rip without and then edit tags with ID TAG UPDATE. Or you can rip with this info, then simply open the file itself in windows explorer and right click and rename the file name to remove all the feat. xxxx stuff. Latter approach may be the easiest.

[PedroT99]

Re: Featured artists

Very good info as always. Thank you. Would you mind looking at the post just prior regarding how my dBp-ripped flacs appear in Winamp? If you have any insight I'd appreciate it. I can't figure it out.

[garym]

Re: Featured artists

no clue about winamp. Probably only picking up the first ARTIST field. Do you notice if this is true (first artlst listed) or is it picking up the first one alphabetically? Anyhow, I don't use winamp so not much help. I know in mp3tag I had to fiddle a bit to get it to show all the artists. I had to use "$meta(artist)" in a custom column rather than just artist. But this is mp3tag specific so won't help you with winamp. It sounds as if the file tags are ok (you are seeing all the artists elsewhere). It is just a winamp display and/or database problem? I'd ask at the winamp forums.

[PedroT99]

Re: Featured artists

Nice! Thanks man!