a TPE2 convo con't from elsewhere

[MrSinatra]

>eg. winamp / gracenote assigns some CDs as "Various Artists" thats an
>indication its a comp as far as that field is concerned.
>
What do you mean "assigns some CD's"? Do you mean when ripping, or when scanning into the library?

i mean ripping and i mean auto-tagging.

winamp has no concept of comps at all. but a human knows its a comp if it says "Various Artists" which is what i meant by "indicaton." when winamp scans, it does nothing one way or the other regarding comps, it simply has no concept of them.

TPE2 can tip off a human it might be a comp.

Entering an arbitrary name is not true indicator of a compilation. How can it be, other than for a human being to interpret the name. It is not a compilation, it's an album by an artist called "Various Artists". And another album by "Various" would be exactly that, not a compilation, and nothing linking the two albums to both be considered browsable as a group of compilation albums.

look i AGREE its not a "true indication" (whatever that actually means), but that isn't the point.

i also agree TPE2 has been hijacked, but thats old news.

your beef is with Gracenote, not me.

>i am pretty sure itunes does the same thing, AND assigns a comp=1 tag.
>
You are wrong.

so if you rip a CD in itunes, and its a genuine compilaton CD, you are saying that it gets a comp=1 tag, but does NOT get a TPE2 tag?

is that what you are saying? i didn't know for sure, but i'll test it if you are saying it does NOT get a TPE2 tag.

if true, fair enough. but most other mainstream apps assign TPE2 and don't assign a comp tag. in fact, itunes is the only one i know of offhand that sets a comp tag at all.

The only albums in iTunes that are compilations are ones that have ITUNESCOMPILATION=1. If I were to enter an album artist name of "Various Artists" (or any other text that you may like a computer to automatically consider to be a compilation) it will not be detected automatically as a compilation. It would be listed under "Various Artists", not under "Compilations".

ok, nothing new there to me, agreed.

iTunes will group songs onto an album if they have an album artist tag.

ok, i'd expect that.

>it is reality, its just you don't want to acknowledge it b/c it doesn't
>jive with what you consider to be correct.
>
it is not reality, its just you don't want to acknowledge it b/c it doesn't jive with what you consider to be correct.

and here is where you seemingly act as if i set it all up this way.

all of this has nothing to do with what i personally see as correct or incorrect.

i am acknowledging the REALITY outside my own individual preconceptions. thats what i am doing that you don't do.

the marketplace is what it is, and newsflash, i had nothing to do with it.

i want SC to work with the marketplace reality, you don't.

I like my library to represent reality; the information that is actually on my CD's, how I file them in my big cabinet of CDs.

and i am saying SC should use the data on the files that is actually there, as it was put there by Gracenote or whatever put it there, b/c thats the expected consistent across apps behavior users will expect. thats the whole reason i advocated 8001.

You are saying I should be able to take an album, say "Dark Side of the Moon", and set Compilation=1. Fine, SC can allow you to do that, but that's not reality. In reality, the album is not a compilation, and without custom tags to override the correct behaviour, it would never be considered a compilation.

when did i advocate marking non-comps with a comp=1 tag? sure, you could do it, but i wouldn't advocate it.

If there were a guest performer on Dark Side of the Moon, say Frank Sinatra was discovered as the actual singer on Us And Them, I would want to set Album Artist=Pink Floyd to prevent it being a Compilation album. Setting Compilation=0 should be irrelevant, as it is the album artist that defines the album as being a Pink Floyd album, and thus not a compilation.

agreed.

comp=0 is functionally not needed b/c having album artist data, such as TPE2 when 8001 is enabled, indicates to SC automatically whatever isn't a comp.

Setting Compilation=1 would not be reality; a decision would need to be made as to what album artist it would then appear under: Pink Floyd, Frank Sinatra or Various Artists?

a user should be able to tag it a comp if they want to, tho i wouldn't, but i wouldn't tell another user they couldn't if they wanted to. they should be able to call it whatever they want as well.

You say in your world, every song in your library should have an album artist. This is no standard, and no app forces that. That is a restriction you have imposed on yourself in your own parallel non-reality.

i mean honestly, are you just trying to be argumentative or what?

WINAMP AND GRACENOTE SET EVERYTHING WITH A TPE2 VALUE.

will you or won't you acknowledge that?

it is not about me, ok?

i will say that in order to use winamp or WMP or other mainstrea apps, every album has to have a TPE2 value to browse albums effectively. will you or won't you acknowledge that as well?

its not my choice, its required to use the app to browse by album artist.

and its the defacto standard of mainstream apps, just as hijacking TPE2 to mean album artist is.

What about songs that are not on albums? Do you still set album artists for them?

songs not on albums? like singles?

gracenote/winamp do, and i allow it, (for all my home rips anyway, i haven't gotten all my downloaded mp3s totally tagged yet, but the autotagger always sets TPE2).

>i already said you may be right in an academic sense, but in the
>pragmatic sense this is not the reality on the ground, the defacto
>standard out there.
Enough of your defacto standards - there is no such word "defacto". A spell-check suggests "defective" :-) The term you are looking for is "De facto", which is latin meaning "in practice".

What you discuss is not a de facto standard. In practice there are many different ways that people work.

sorry, from now on i will say de facto. what an important correction to make!

getting back to the point, there are de facto standards, whether or not you want to admit it. i think its high time that you should just admit you were wrong.

this whole debate started not over comp tags, but over the fact that mainstream app users have to use TPE2 on comp cds, and that gracenote sets that value. you said that wasn't true, and i have proven you wrong.

if there were no de facto standards, SC would not have implemented 8001 but they did. and they wouldn't have comp tag support, but they do.

the mainstream apps created the conditions SC conformed to in both cases.

if you deny that, you only hurt your own credibility imo.

[MrSinatra]

>> SC needs to make a decision as to what the album artist should be. So,
>> maybe the right logic would be for Compilation=1 to take precidence
>> over TPE2, but TPE2 should take precidence over Compilation=0. That
>> would work for all cases, I believe:
>
>praise god, did you just agree with me??!?!?!
>
>yes comp=1 should take precedence if present, but TPE2 should still be
>used for denoting, (if present).

Obviously we aren't quite in agreement because when I say Compilation=1 should take precidence, I mean that it should then use the SC library setting for representing compilation albums ("When compilation albums are grouped together, they appear under "Various Artists" by default. You can change that name below."), and not anything that may be in the album artist field.

i think you misunderstand me...

yes, they should "appear" ie. be sorted there, under that category heading whatever it may be, but the album shoud still be displayed as "by album artist" when its displayed.

[MrSinatra]

>I parrot the argument that whilst SC may use a much better, more
>elegant, super logical approach to the Album Artist tag
>
SC is exactly the same as any other app. The confusion [that this sub-thread is talking about] is to do with compilation tags, and their effect on Album Artist. If you don't want compilation albums, don't add non-standard compilation tags to your mp3 files and you've got nothing to worry about.

thats all true, but thats not the whole story.

you said i shouldn't have TPE2 tags on comps for SC or anything else. now you are hearing from itbath, that you do to work with other apps.

i wonder if it will change your mind?

>the fact is I just want it to work like the other applications I've used.
>
Album Artist tags do work like any other app. You don't need to have compilation tags.

The caveat to that is that SC by default reads the mp3 Band/Orchestra tag as if it contains Band/Orchestra data. That's the standard, and that's important for people with Band data or Classical music collections. It also supports an Album Artist tag for mp3, so people who tag in that way can have the best of both worlds. For people who want backwards compatibility with other less capable apps, there's an option to read the Band tag as if it is also Album Artist. This caveat only applies to mp3 id3v2.3 tags, as most other tagging formats have proper album artist tags.

itbath, here's my mp3 advice:

continue to use TPE2 as your other apps do to mark album artist. set SC to read TPE2 as album artist.

then, IF you still want a mp3 known as a comp to SC, mark it with a comp=1 tag.

that may or may not be currently buggy with SC, but ultimately i think SC will get the two to work together and coexist if they aren't already, (a comp=1 classifys it as a comp but its still denoted by TPE2).

>Just show me a list of all the contents of my Album Artist tags (I bet you can't
>find another similar application that doesn't do exactly that).

i don't follow what you [itbath] mean here?

>I have seen many apps that don't. The biggest example I can think of is iTunes, because it expands track artists into the list when browsing by artist too.

winamp lets you browse by TPE1 or TPE2, easily.

again, i'm no itunes expert, but it seems odd to me that it wouldn't allow you to browse by album artist/TPE2.

Personally, I hardly ever browse my whole collection by album, and never sort albums by album artist when I do. If I want to find by artist and then album, I browse by artist, and then drill down into albums for that artist. It's essentially the same as browse albums, sorted by album artist, but more hierarchical, and quicker to pull back data to the screen and also faster to find things. Browsing by artist can also include that artists normal albums, and any compilation album that the artist appears on as a contributor. It's so much nicer that way, and faster too.

great for you, but not me.

i want to browse by artwork, with my albums arranged by my files TPE2 data.

winamp and WMP do it that way.

But SC does allow you to browse all albums ordered by artist (using album artist if there is one defined for the album) for people who prefer browsing a long flat list of albums.

Phil

or with artwork.

[erland]

I'm sorry I don't have the time to read through all this discussion back and forth and I'm pretty sure most SqueezeCenter developers feel the same way.

Would it be possible to summarize what needs to be changed in SqueezeCenter to end all these compilation debates ?

And preferable list a number of registered bug reports/enhancement request that describes what needs to be done.

These kind of long discussions only results in entertainment and time waste for the rest of us, but I'm pretty sure few or none of the developers will have time to read threads like this to see what needs to be done.

SqueezeCenter should IMHO be configured by default so it works good for 80% (preferable 95%) of the potential users, this means it needs to work with music libraries of various formats with reasonable amount of tagging information. Users that want the perfect behavior based on very detailed or special tagging will IMHO have to use third party plugins or do their own modifications to the SqueezeCenter code.

As I've understand the intended behavior is:
- If an album has several artists it is considered a compilation unless it has been tagged with an album artist.
- If an album only has a single artist it is not considered to be a compilation.
- If an album has a single album artist it is not considered to be a compilation independent on how many track artists it have.

You can override this behavior with a custom COMPILATION tag set to 0 or 1.

This behavior makes perfect sense to me and I'm pretty sure it makes sense to most SC users. You can always argue that SC shouldn't do compilation logic at all, but this really is an enhancement compared to other applications so I can't see a problem with it as most users are going to like it. If SC doesn't work as above, that's probably a bug and doesn't have to be discussed, just write a bug report.

Unfortunately the MP3 standard doesn't have a standard album artist tag, so SqueezeCenter tries to do the best and adds an option which you can use to indicate if you like to use the "Band"(TPE2) tag as album artist instead of re-tagging your library. Other applications has decided to hard code that "Band" should be "Album Artist" even if it violates what the MP3 standard says. IMHO the SC solution is better since it give the user a choice.

[Philip Meyer]

Hi Erland,

>I'm sorry I don't have the time to read through all this discussion
>
You wouldn't enjoy it if you did
Thanks for stepping in to get this discussion back on track.

>Would it be possible to summarize what needs to be changed in
>SqueezeCenter to end all these compilation debates ?
>
Not much at all, in my opinion.

The issue is how to deal with cases when there are both Album Artist tags AND Compilation tags, specifically in mp3 id3v2.3 files (although I would think this is a generic scanner processing problem with any tagging format). There are no problems being discussed for when either Album Artist OR Compilation tags are used (or none).

The problem that has been identified is when songs on an album have album artist tags AND a compilation = 0 tag. From what I gather, in this case the album artist and track artist roles do not get populated and normal artist contributor roles are stored in the SC library instead. As a result, contributing artists get blown out into the Browse Artists list, even if those artists only appear as guest performers.

I believe this is because SC reads and processes compilation tags first, so COMPILATION=1 takes precidence over any defined album artist, and the album artist would be displayed as Various Artists (or whatever the VA string is defined as in SC settings).

I believe in previous posts of this nature, most people were in agreement that Album Artist tags should take precidence, in that if there is an album artist, the album can't be a compilation, as the point of an album artist tag is to group differing contributors to list them under that artist name instead of Various Artists.

SC scanner could be changed to process tags something like the following:
if Compilation tag = 1
store album as a compilation, artist tags become track artist roles.
ELSE
if Album Artist tags exist
store album with album artist role = Album Artist tag, and artist tags become track artist roles.
else
if artist tags on song on the album are different
store album as a compilation, artist tags become track artist roles.

COMPILATION=0 needs to be addressed in this logic though (see below).


Personally:
I don't think there's any urgent need to make any changes. Most users do not have compilation tags, and there have not been many complaints about things not working. A workaround is that there should either be an album artist OR a compilation tag, not both.

As the DB schema is being totally reworked, it's not worth trying to sort this out now.

>And preferable list a number of registered bug reports/enhancement
>request that describes what needs to be done.
>
I think Mr. Sinatra wrote a bug report, but I haven't read it yet.

>As I've understand the intended behavior is:
>- If an album has several artists it is considered a compilation unless
>it has been tagged with an album artist.
>
>- If an album only has a single artist it is not considered to be a
>compilation.
>- If an album has a single album artist it is not considered to be a
>compilation independent on how many track artists it have.
>
>You can override this behavior with a custom COMPILATION tag set to 0
>or 1.
>
>This behavior makes perfect sense to me and I'm pretty sure it makes
>sense to most SC users. You can always argue that SC shouldn't do
>compilation logic at all, but this really is an enhancement compared to
>other applications so I can't see a problem with it as most users are
>going to like it.

And to me. Your summary is what I believe too, although COMPILATION=0 has another use. I think it is due to the default iTunes behaviour of always storing ripped songs in artist/album/track folder hierarchy. As a result, SC would see that as several albums of the same name; one for each artist, due to the way it solves the "Greatest Hits" issue. And thus I think COMPILATION=0 is used to rejoin all songs back into one album.

Mr. Sinatra is stating that for any user that has ever used any other application or receives tags from metadata sources, all albums will always have an album artist tag. So, there will never be compilation albums.

Phil

[InTheBath]

In order to try to lay out clearly what my problem is, I’ve played with a small library (195 tracks) of various compilations and albums with guest artists from my collection. These are either mp3 or WMA lossless files.
All tagging done in mp3tag. Version 7.2.1 of SqueezeCentre.

To start with I peeled down the tags to what I have as standard in my library. Here’s a sample from one of the mp3 albums:
TALB – Gorillaz
TPE1 – Gorillaz;Ibrahim Ferrer
TPE2 – Gorillaz
TBPM – 57
TCOM – Damon Albarn;Lazaro Villa
TCON – Rock
TPUB – Virgin
TIT2 – Latin Simone
TRCK – 12
TDRC – 2001
TXXX – four or five tags that have something to do with replay gain
APIC – Assume this is something to do with album art?
I’ve looked in the file with a hex editor to check they have the tags as above. I can’t do that for the WMA files.

Now I set the library options in SC.
I don’t have Composer or Conductor or Band in my Artist tags, so have left those unchecked.

1. To start with I have
“Group Compilation Albums Together”
“List Albums by All Artists for that Album”
“Treat TPE2 MP3 Tag as Album Artist”

Do a complete rescan and Browse Artists…

The six Album Artists in the library appear. Browsing five of them, everything looks peachy. The “Track Artists” TPE1 are correctly identified and labelled.
However, “Various Artists” appears as an artist to browse (although not duplicated at the top of the tree), but there are no albums shown underneath it.

2. I now set
“Group Compilation Albums Together”
“List Albums by All Artists for that Album”
“Treat TPE2 MP3 Tag as Band”

Do a complete rescan and Browse Artists…

Now Various Artists appears twice (at the top of the tree and in its alphabetical place). However, Gorillaz do not appear – their albums are listed under “Various Artists”. They are indicated as Compilations and (using the above track as an example) Artist (not “Track Artist”) is Damon Albarn, Ibrahim Ferrer and Band/Orchestra is shown as “Gorillaz”. WMA VA albums are still not shown.

3. I now set
“Group Compilation Albums Together”
“List Albums by All Artists for that Album”
“Treat TPE2 MP3 Tag as Album Artist”
(as per 1) but I tag each track on a Various Artists album with a “Compilation = 1” tag.

Do a complete rescan and Browse Artists…

Now Various Artists appears twice (at the top of the tree and in its alphabetical place) and Gorillaz appear as an Artist – their albums are NOT listed under “Various Artists”. WMA VA albums are still not shown – although I have noticed that a VA album with three mp3 tracks and one WMA track is showing all four tracks.

4. I now leave the settings alone
“Group Compilation Albums Together”
“List Albums by All Artists for that Album”
“Treat TPE2 MP3 Tag as Album Artist”
But I delete the BAND tag in the WMA VA albums. I instead add an ALBUMARTIST tag of “Various Artists”

Do a complete rescan and Browse Artists…

Now Various Artists appears once (at the top of the tree) and everything seems peachy. WMA VA albums are shown. All is right with the world.




Sorry if this has been long-winded, but it should be replicable. My conclusions are:
1. Set a Compilation=1 on all Various Artist albums (although might not do anything on WMA files).
2. Set the Band tag on all files except WMA Various Artist albums. Use the Album Artist field instead for these.
“Group Compilation Albums Together”
“List Albums by All Artists for that Album”
“Treat TPE2 MP3 Tag as Album Artist”


Maybe the problem is with mp3tag, maybe it’s a weakness in WMA files. Whatever, it’s taken me a lot of hassle to get to this stage…

I’d be interested if 1-4 act as expected as in many of them tracks are just plain missing.

Feel free to move this post somewhere else if it makes following this thread easier, or format it nicely, or ignore it altogether. I had to do this exercise anyway to get my thoughts straight(ish).

S.

[Philip Meyer]

I'm not going to reply to all sub-threads, it's getting out of hand.

Let's settle the air a bit.

I don't have any problem with TPE2 being used to represent album artist. I didn't mind that the option to select whether it meant Band or Album Artist contributor role was added to the scanner. I don't even particularly mind if it were the default for new users.

What I was concerned with at the time was if it replaced the existing functionality, or changed the way things worked for existing users without warning. I was also against it setting *BOTH* Band AND Album Artist, as that would have caused incorrect behaviour.

I'm happy with the outcome, and that it helps other users out. Who knows, in the future I may even decide to change to TPE2=Album Artist - if there were suitable alternative custom tags supported in SC for me to read Band/Orchestra information from instead. Typically it doesn't really concern me much, because I now rip to FLAC with FLAC tags. I don't really use other media player apps much (Foobar for desktop playback because of the SoftSqueeze/SqueezePlay fiasco, and iTunes just for syncing a small sub-set of my library to an iPod Nano, although I mainly use the iPod for PodCasts). SC meets my needs, so I make the most out of the functionality it provides.


In my experience of ripping CD albums, applications don't often set TPE2 content. I'm sure most apps do set TPE2 for mp3 id3v2.3 tags when the user enters what the app calls "Album Artist", but in my experience, metadata sources do not often set this. Of course, there's nothing to stop a user manually entering it, but I don't see why users would do that, for the cases when it is not necessary, which it most frequently is not.

i.e. when all songs on an album are by the same artist, only artist tags are retrieved and album artist is blank.

I don't think free.db holds any album artist data, or at least Mp3Tag, a very popular tagging app never sets TPE2 for me when I have used it to retrieve metadata. EAC never sets Album Artist for me either (I rip to FLAC these days).

I must admit that I don't know too much about Gracenote, as I haven't used any apps that have retrieved from that metadata source. I did query albums via a web interface, and didn't notice album artist information in the results, but it's not a full test.

But free.db is the most popular free source of metadata. Almost all rippers/tagging apps seem to support it.

Compilation albums in free.db are most frequently stored as ARTIST=Various and the song title containing the performing artist name. Album Artist is not set.

I just tried ripping albums in iTunes as a comparative test. I picked two compilation albums and had a look at the results. It automatically found the metadata for both albums (I assume it gets metadata from their own iTunes store and perhaps from other sources too). All songs on both albums had "Part of compilation"=Yes, and each Artist tag was set to the performing artist. Album Artist (TPE2) was left blank.

All such albums from iTunes or free.db source would be displayed adequately in SC without needing to change any tags.

[Philip Meyer]

Case 1: Appears to be working as designed.
As you have configured TPE2 to represent album artist, you have album artists and thus the albums are not compilations. The example album would be found as an album under Gorillaz.
"Various Artists" is a special artist name provided by SC to hold any compilation albums. As you don't have any, there's no albums listed under that artist. [However, I don't think it should be there if there aren't any compilation albums in your collection. Sounds like a bug].

Case 2: Appears to be working as designed.
Configuring TPE2 to represent Band, means you haven't got album artists any more, and thus the albums are detected automatically as compilation albums (because track artists are different). Compilation albums are displayed under an artist called "Various Artists".

>WMA VA albums are still not shown.
Are you saying you have a problem with WMA VA albums all the time? You didn't mention it in case 1.

Case 3:
Sounds interesting. I thought we'd assessed that COMPILATION=1 overruled Album Artist, but this sounds like the opposite has occurred.
In both cases 1 and 3, you had no compilation albums listed.

Case 4: Appears to be working as designed.
An ALBUMARTIST tag has been defined for WMA tags. WMA seems to officially support both BAND and ALBUMARTIST tags. The TPE2 setting doesn't apply to WMA tags - it's mp3 id3v2.x only.


>1. Set a Compilation=1 on all Various Artist albums (although might not
>do anything on WMA files).
Not sure why you have come to that conclusion, but maybe I don't understand. It appears that had no effect in Case 3 - as album artist overruled the compilation flag?

>2. Set the Band tag on all files except WMA Various Artist albums.
You can set Band on WMA Various Artist albums too if you like; will not have any effect on the album other than displaying a band associated with the songs.

>Use the Album Artist field instead for these.
That's the crucial bit.


Thanks for your experimentation and feedback.

Phil

[InTheBath]

Case 1: Appears to be working as designed.
As you have configured TPE2 to represent album artist, you have album artists and thus the albums are not compilations. The example album would be found as an album under Gorillaz.
"Various Artists" is a special artist name provided by SC to hold any compilation albums. As you don't have any, there's no albums listed under that artist. [However, I don't think it should be there if there aren't any compilation albums in your collection. Sounds like a bug].

Note that I do have compilation albums, they just aren't appearing. I think the VA listing wasn't at the top of the list so is probably not SC's special VA, but rather a consequence of me having Band set as Various Artists on my compilations. Still don't understand why the albums didn't show up though.

Case 2: Appears to be working as designed.
Configuring TPE2 to represent Band, means you haven't got album artists any more, and thus the albums are detected automatically as compilation albums (because track artists are different). Compilation albums are displayed under an artist called "Various Artists".

>WMA VA albums are still not shown.
Are you saying you have a problem with WMA VA albums all the time? You didn't mention it in case 1.

No compilations turned up in Case 1. No mp3 comps and no WMA comps. in case 2 I just have the mp3 comps.

Case 3:
Sounds interesting. I thought we'd assessed that COMPILATION=1 overruled Album Artist, but this sounds like the opposite has occurred.
In both cases 1 and 3, you had no compilation albums listed.

Yep. And every time I try to sort it, I'm always baffled by the behaviour. Having written it down and progressed through a bit more logically has helped though.

Case 4: Appears to be working as designed.
An ALBUMARTIST tag has been defined for WMA tags. WMA seems to officially support both BAND and ALBUMARTIST tags. The TPE2 setting doesn't apply to WMA tags - it's mp3 id3v2.x only.

Then maybe everythings fine? I don't understand why things work as they do but I've now got what I need to get albums treated pretty consistently by SqueezeCentre. It does mean I have to follow the steps below:

>1. Set a Compilation=1 on all Various Artist albums (although might not
>do anything on WMA files).
Not sure why you have come to that conclusion, but maybe I don't understand. It appears that had no effect in Case 3 - as album artist overruled the compilation flag?

The only difference between Case 1 and Case 3 was setting this flag. In Case 1 I had no comps listed. In Case 3 I'm only missing the WMA comps. So this flag is needed to make my mp3 comps show up.

>2. Set the Band tag on all files except WMA Various Artist albums.
You can set Band on WMA Various Artist albums too if you like; will not have any effect on the album other than displaying a band associated with the songs.

>Use the Album Artist field instead for these.
That's the crucial bit.

It would be nice to just use Band for consistency, but I can live with this. I'm trying to keep my tags down to what I want and strip out anything extraenous to prevent problems like this reoccuring. It's not a biggy though. Just need to remember, whenever I rip a comp into WMA format I have to set an extra tag.

My tagging is fairly sorted now. I have two problems left which are minor and will have to wait whilst I appreciate my music rather then hunching over a PC pi$$ing about with tags.

Thanks for all your help. I hope my notes a couple of messages back may help others?

S.

[Philip Meyer]

Note that I do have compilation albums, they just aren't appearing. I think the VA listing wasn't at the top of the list so is probably not SC's special VA, but rather a consequence of me having Band set as Various Artists on my compilations. Still don't understand why the albums didn't show up though.

I would not expect any compilations in case 1. You don't have compilation tags, so albums will only appear as compilations if they have differing performing artists AND they don't have an album artist tag.

As you do have an album artist tag, the albums are listed as normal albums by the album artist (Gorillaz).

No compilations turned up in Case 1. No mp3 comps and no WMA comps. in case 2 I just have the mp3 comps.

That is also expected. Remember the TPE2 scanner setting is only for id3v2.3 tags, so has no effect on WMA tags.

With TPE2=Band, you effectively have no album artist tags for your mp3 albums(because you haven't got TXXX ALBUMARTIST tags). You haven't got compilation tags either, so SC scanner looks at each performing artist for each song. As it finds differing artists and there's no album artist defined, it assumes that the album is a compilation, and thus the album artist is reported as SC's special "Various Artists".

The only difference between Case 1 and Case 3 was setting this flag. In Case 1 I had no comps listed. In Case 3 I'm only missing the WMA comps. So this flag is needed to make my mp3 comps show up.
It would be nice to just use Band for consistency

The compilation tag not needed.

You could either remove the album artist (represented by TPE2) tags for your compilation songs, and SC would then detect the album as a compilation (or you could explicitly set the compilation tag - it doesn't matter), or you set album artist (TPE2 or TXXX ALBUMARTIST) to whatever you want the artist to be listed under.

Setting both an album artist and a compilation tag is likely to cause strange behaviour, and the behaviour is more likely to change in the future.

There may be different effects, depending on how you like to browse your library too.

When browsing by artist, it's failrly obvious, as there's a single list of artists (or album artists) in artist order. Compilation albums would always only appear under "Various Artists".

When browsing by albums, sorted by artist, where would an album that is a compilation and has an album artist be expected to appear? I would say that I'd expect them to be listed under the album artist and not "Various Artists" (the album artist may be "Various Artists" anyway, but could be anything). That is why I believe album artist should overrule compilation tags for consistency.