How to make 'Album Artist' = Album, if there is no data for Album Artist

[Ade]

Hi there

MCE2005 is a pain in the butt sometimes!
It will *only* read the album information from the "Album Artist" tag, and will disregard the "Album" tag when arranging and showing albums. If there isn't a value in the "Album Artist" tag, it will simply show "Unknown Album" - Extremely annoying!

I've never actually seen the "Album Artist" tag populated in any of the CD's I have ripped, so is there an option to copy the value from the "Album" tag?

I often forget to copy the value over before ripping, which makes it a pain to either re-ripp, or edit the tag externally.

Many thanks
Ade

[Spoon]

Re: How to make 'Album Artist' = Album, if there is no data for Album Artist

You can use the utility codec [update id tag] to copy all arists to album artists, use with the batch selector program to do all your files in one go.

[LtData]

Re: How to make 'Album Artist' = Album, if there is no data for Album Artist

Or, more precisely, you can use the "ID Tag Update" utility codec to map Artist to Album Artist.

If you don't have an "Album Artist" tag at all, not just an empty tag, it still says "Unknown Album"?

[Ade]

Re: How to make 'Album Artist' = Album, if there is no data for Album Artist

Hi

Just a quick 'thank you' to you both, what was suggested worked better than I could have hoped for. Managed to update my entire collection in about 20 mins (and that was on a RAID0 array, its pretty big! ).

Just for reference LtData and for anyone else who may come across the same issue, it seems that MCE2005 is hard coded only to accept the 'Album Artist' tag. When one doesn't exist, it doesn't fall back to the 'Artist' one unfortunately [seems this is well documented around the web :(].
I've no idea if the latest version in Vista behaves any differently.

Again, many thanks! :komisch12