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Topic: Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist? (Read 4870 times) previous topic - next topic
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Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

From people's experience, is there value to filling in the "album artist" field across my entire music library, even in cases where it is redundant with the "artist" field? This is mainly a question about compatibility with various existing programs.

Thus far, I have only filled it in on files/albums where it is not redundant with the "artist" field, such as various-artist albums. However, it seems that filling in the "album artist" field is becoming more standard, and is now assumed by many programs.  For example, while I use foobar2000 on my computer, I've recently started using Google Music which uses album artist to check redundancy among possible duplicates, and also have a Microsoft phone which uses Zune to sync music and Zune fills in the "album artist" field by default and uses it to override artist when browsing through music.

I also have a related question about the use of "album artist" on albums where guest artists appear on some tracks. I have typically filled in guest artists in the track title, so tagging set up as follows:
Artist: Dr. Dre
Title: Forgot About Dre (ft. Eminem)

But alternately I could use "artist" as track artist, and use the "album artist" field to ensure grouping.
Artist: Dr. Dre/Eminem
Album Artist: Dr. Dre
Title: Forgot About Dre

Again, I'm mainly wondering about compatibility with hardware/software implementations. My Sansa mp3 player, for example, uses only the "artist" field and so a track by "Dr. Dre/Eminem" would show up separately when browsing artists compared to a track by Dr. Dre without a guest artist.

note: this question/thread is intended to be about use of "album artist" tags for audio files in general, not specifically about the mp3 implementation. However, at this point I am assuming the TPE2 field (originally band/orchestra) functions as the de facto "album artist" field for mp3, even though it is not the originally intended use of the field according to mp3 spec. I'd rather not debate the value of this usage in this thread; as I see it, WMP and iTunes started using the TPE2 field for "album artist" and it became common enough that we're stuck with it, optimal or not.
God kills a kitten every time you encode with CBR 320

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #1 –
I use your second tagging strategy - album artist is the primary artist, artist for each track is the actual people on the track. It allows you to keep album lists neat and ordered.

My use of album artist for single artist albums is patchy - like you I have found some players that don't like it (my iPod Touch 2G did strange things), so I am experimenting with a combination of album artist and setting the iTunes compilation flag to see if that delivers the desired behaviour.

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Ouroboros on
I use your second tagging strategy - album artist is the primary artist, artist for each track is the actual people on the track. It allows you to keep album lists neat and ordered.

Again, a lot of the practicality here comes down to the particular software/hardware that one uses, or is likely to use in the future.

Quote
My use of album artist for single artist albums is patchy - like you I have found some players that don't like it (my iPod Touch 2G did strange things), so I am experimenting with a combination of album artist and setting the iTunes compilation flag to see if that delivers the desired behaviour.

The Compilation flag (nice use of that term btw, as it's more of a "switch" that can be on or off, than a tag field) can be helpful with iTunes, and I think its main usefulness is governing the default folder structure (i.e., compliations get sorted by album subfolders within a "Compilation" folder at the same level as the normal artist-name folders).
I've never had an iPod, but from my understanding songs that are from albums flagged as compilations will still show up with an entry for each individual track artist (unless the album artist field has "various artists" but this may be something that is not adopted on earlier iPod devices).


For my case, If I'm going to fill in the album artist tag, it will be the same as artist for most music in my collection (albums by a single artist without guest performers on any tracks) and I'll figure out some way to automate this process in foobar2000 or mp3tag.
God kills a kitten every time you encode with CBR 320

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: timcupery on
From people's experience, is there value to filling in the "album artist" field across my entire music library, even in cases where it is redundant with the "artist" field?
No, not for me.

Quote from: timcupery on
But alternately I could use "artist" as track artist, and use the "album artist" field to ensure grouping.
Artist: Dr. Dre/Eminem
Album Artist: Dr. Dre
Title: Forgot About Dre

Here, it looks like:
ARTIST=Dr. Dre
ARTIST=Eminem
TITLE=Forgot About Dre
ALBUM ARTIST=Dr. Dre
As you can see, Album Artist is not redundant with Artist for this particular track, IMHO.

For Compilations, when there is no main Album Artist, I useually tag ALBUM ARTIST=Various Artists *and* COMPILATION=1.

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #4 –
I just use "(feat. <other artists>)" in the title.  I make sure whatever I use to tag doesn't fill anything in but artist, album, track, title, and genre.  That is my scheme.  What fits for me doesn't work for most people.

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #5 –
Here's what I do. I don't recommend or encourage it, but it works for me.

Like the OP, if a track or two on an album has a featured or guest artist, they get the Artist1/Artist2 treatment in the ARTIST field, with the main artist only in the ALBUM ARTIST field.

Some albums that are duets or the like I tag like this:
Album Artist = Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
Artist = Robert Plant/Alison Krauss
Tagged this way, if I view the collection by artist, the album shows up both for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

For tribute albums, rather than using a generic "Various Artists" for album artist, I tag that with the artist being "tributed".

If a various artists album is part of a series, I'll put the series name in the album artist field. This nicely sorts all the albums in a series together, rather than being lumped in a huge "Various Artists" pile.

I'm not entirely consistent with my tagging, but I do get a lot of utility out of the album artist field.
 

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #6 –
I guess with powerful players like foobar, a person could make some statements for displaying either the artist tag or the album artist tag depending if they differ.  Now it's begging to make sense to me.

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #7 –
In my FLAC library I add ALBUMARTIST to every file, even when it's the same as ARTIST. It's trivial when using Mp3tag to finish tagging a CD that I've ripped. I also add the sort fields ARTISTSORT, ALBUMSORT and ALBUMARTISTSORT even when they're the same as the corresponding field. Once Mp3tag action groups are created to automate tagging, it's actually more work to not include them, and I like that all files have nearly the exact same set of fields.

Tagging decisions are often very application dependent. Some applications that offer browsing by ALBUMARTIST require the field to be present if you want to see the artist in a list of album artists. The COMPILATION field is similar. It seldom hurts to add it, and some applications will behave better seeing it on VA albums.

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #8 –
Like the OP, I've been avoiding ALBUMARTIST except when it's not the same as the artist on all the tracks. Mainly it's just because I never could figure out which of ALBUMARTIST, ALBUM ARTIST, and BAND was expected by each app, and I didn't want to guess wrong or add tags I didn't need.

This is slightly off topic, but aside from normalization for consistency, I greatly prefer the artist name joiner (in Discogs parlance) to remain intact. You lose it if you're putting each name in its own artist tag, or normalizing the joiner to "/", as suggested in this thread. Such changes may benefit the applications that will file the track under each artist name simultaneously, but I don't like losing the display name—I'd rather count on seeing "Dr. Dre feat. Eminem" as the artist name, regardless of what device it's on. The only way to ensure that is to make it be the ARTIST value.

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #9 –
Interesting. I was just thinking of this earlier tonight. I was listening to several Neil Young albums but some were really Neil Young and some were Neil young & Crazy Horse but I only have the Artist field completed. Would it be appropriate to show Neil Young & Crazy Horse in the Album Artist field?  When there is a guest artist only on one or two songs I have simply changed the song title to include (featuring so and so).  Would it be appropriate in this example to use the Album Artist field ans where appropriate list Artistn A & Artist B or Artist A featuring Artist B? 

I am interested in how others are managing this.

Album artist: any value of including it when it is the same as artist?

Reply #10 –
In a single artist album i fill the [album artist] field with the main performer/composer, leaving multiple-value field [track artist] for all the contributing artists in the particular track. I.e. i do not put statements such as 'featuring', 'vs.', 'presents' nor any like these in [title] field.
When it comes to VA compilations I put the compilation brand into [album artist] field:
VA - RMF FM radio: The best summer Hits 2010
[track artist] - artist(s) for the given track
[album] - RMF FM - The best summer Hits 2010
[album artist] - RMF FM //since this radio released many compilations so far.