Artist field - How do you prefer it?

[Bento]

Hi All,

I'm relatively new to dBpoweramp, however did use EAC years ago to rip a few of my favourite CDs, and I thought it was about time I got round to putting the rest of my CDs onto my network storage.

Just a question really about which is the best way to ensure the Artist field is correctly formatted.

For an example I have a compilation CD here, which has got the artist listed as "Artist Feat. Someone". However when I load the CD in into the CD Ripper, the majority of the metadata providers give me "Artist; Someone".

Just wondering what the pro's and con's of either way are, and which is the better path to go down? Copying the CD listing exactly, or separating artists with a semi-colon, and dropping things like feat. and vs.

Many thanks!

Ben.

[Spoon]

Re: Artist field - How do you prefer it?

Artist1; Artist2 is just a representation of the multiple artists, it is not written to the file as artist1; artist2, it is written in the correct format for the id tags, so for flac:

artist=artist1
artist=artist2

for mp3 it could be:

artist1/artist2

It is then the player which can read both artists correctly (wheras if stored as artist1 ft. artist2 it could not pickup artist2)

[Bento]

Re: Artist field - How do you prefer it?

Thanks Spoon, a great help!

[garym]

Re: Artist field - How do you prefer it?

There's no right or wrong answer here, only personal preference and what your players can (or can't handle). My primary playing is with squeezeboxes & logitech media server or foobar2000 on my computer. I do the following:

1. if ARTIST (or multiple artists) same for entire album, I leave ALBUM ARTIST BLANK
2. if there are true multiple artists on an album (e.g., Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis, Two Men With the Blues), I'll use the multiple artist approach Spoon described for FLAC files (that is, there are TWO artist fields in the flac tags, one that has Willie and one that has Wynton). In my players, the album shows up under either artist when browsing, searching, etc.
3. If there is a track or two with some special guest I want to know about, I either put in in the title of the song ("song title (with XXXX)" so I can see this when playing. If not that interested in knowing the guest, I simply put the info in a comment tag for that track.
4. If there is a true compilation (lots of artists), I tag the album with COMPILATION = 1, and leave ALBUM ARTIST BLANK (rather than entering "Various Artists" My players all group compilations separately as well as showing the relevant tracks with the ARTIST when browsing.
5. Basically, the only time I use ALBUM ARTIST at all is (a) when I have an album I want to show up under an artist, even though that artist not on the album (e.g., I put "Bob Dylan" as the ALBUM ARTIST on a Bob Dylan tribute CD by different artists), or (b) an Artist has many different names and I want them all to show up under the same listing (e.g., Doug Sahm, Doug Sahm & Friends, Sir Douglas Quintet, The Masked Men, Wayne Douglas, etc. --I put ALBUM ARTIST = Doug Sahm for all these variations)

[Bento]

Re: Artist field - How do you prefer it?

Thanks garym,

Really useful seeing how you've done this too.

I'm starting to work out what naming convention I'm going to use as there are so many to choose from out there it's quite difficult, what with incomplete support for multiple artists depending on what you're using to play your media. (Infact I think I may just do the evil deed and use one artist tag only for compatibility and just leave things as Artist A feat. Artist B, I haven't decided).

Also, Spoon, is there any way to get the CD Ripper to write multiple artists which are separated by semicolons into the filenames, as a semicolon is not an illegal filename character. This would help massively as I'd like all artists in a track searchable by filename too.

[Spoon]

Re: Artist field - How do you prefer it?

It is not possible to write multiple artists to the filename, only the main one.