'Album Artist' Tag Supported?

[Howard Darwen]

for mix album stuff i just set album artist to various and set the DJ name
in the album title (in freedb) ... it's not perfect i know, but you loose
the capability to have separate album and track artists when you encode to
MP3 / FLAC (or whatever) anyway.

not seen a decent tag you could use for the DJ who mixed the compilation.

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces (AT) lists (DOT) slimdevices.com
[mailto:discuss-bounces (AT) lists (DOT) slimdevices.com]On Behalf Of kdf
Sent: 05 October 2004 21:04
To: Slim Devices Discussion
Subject: [slim] 'Album Artist' Tag Supported?


Quoting Stephen Rush <stephen_rush (AT) hotmail (DOT) com>:

> I use the Album Artist tag to hold my the 'Various Artist' text and use
> Artist to hold the actual artist for Soundtrack albums. Also use this tag
> for DJ-themed albums: Album Artist = Paul Oakenfold and again Artist is
> actual track artist.
> Am tempted to hack (find and replace at my skill level) the Composer
option
> to read Album Artist, no clue if this would work...any offical support
> forthcoming?
> Am open to other tagging suggestions too, as I have yet to mass rip to
flac.

which formats do you need to suport this tag? I believe for WMA this tag is
mapped to Artist, but I might be wrong.

-kdf

[Nicholas Gianniotis]

Howard Darwen writes:

> for mix album stuff i just set album artist to various and set
> the DJ name in the album title (in freedb) ... it's not perfect
> i know, but you loose the capability to have separate album and
> track artists when you encode to MP3 / FLAC (or whatever)
> anyway.

> not seen a decent tag you could use for the DJ who mixed the
> compilation.

I, too, am struggling to get my Various albums both indexed properly
and played in the correct track order. I "flattened" my compilation
albums and attributed the actual artists in the ARTIST tags, so I've
run into the problem where the track order is now wrong - which
strangely only happens on multi-disc sets. (This issue has been
discussed on this list before.)

I haven't even begun to try and solve the problem of attributing DJs
as separate entities, however, my idea is to use the Slimserver
feature "Multiple Items In Tags". So, for example, on the 3-disc
Ministry of Sound set "Trance Nation Anthems", mixed by Judge Jules,
for the track "Children" by "Robert Miles", I'd set the ARTIST tag to
"Judge Jules;Robert Miles" (assuming my separator char is ";"). That
way when I browse by Artist I'll see separate entries for Judge Jules
and Robert Miles. It's still a hack but possibly better than nothing.

As you probably know, FLAC files can be tagged with Ogg Vorbis comment
blocks. A useful resource which suggests how these tags can be used
can be found at http://reference.reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html.

Also, the MusicBrainz effort, which strives to come up with the mother
of all DB schemas for organizing music, does have provision for
separately attributing items such as "DJ", "Mix Name", and just about
every other case that exists. More info at
http://www.musicbrainz.org/db_structure.html. Unfortunately, AFAIK,
the MusicBrainz DB schema is not tied to any tagging standards.

HTH,
Nico