How do "Various Artists" CDs work?

[JulianL]

I just riped and tagged about 700 CDs. I last did a SlimServer scan after 200 to see how it looked and it behaved axactly as I hoped, i.e. I can go to an artist and see all the albums (CDs) I have by that artise, just like my physical CD racks.

I've just now started riping my last few compilation (various artists) CDs so now I have tracks that show as no album in the tags but each track has title and artist tag set.

How will all this come out in the browsing interface? For artists where I own some "real" albums will I see the 3 real albums (for instance) and then all their other tracks on compilation CDs under some special album name? If not then how does it work?

Some might say just try it but I have a slow PC so to scan the entire collection, decide I don't like it and should have edited the tags first, edit the tags, and then rescan, will take a long time so I would really like to get some idea of what to expect so that I can at least attempt to get it right first time.

- Julian

[radish]

If the track's album tag is blank it will appear in a special "No Album" section under Browse Albums. My guess is the same will happen if you do Browse Artists, you'll get their albums and a No Album section containing all their compilation appearances (in no specific order).

Why aren't the album tags populated? Makes life a lot simpler.

[JulianL]

Why aren't the album tags populated? Makes life a lot simpler.
Because I'm an idiot and wasn't thinking straight when I typed my first message. I use EAC for my initial tagging so what I meant to type was that the Artist tag at the Album level in EAC is greyed out (and EAC seems to disect the title tracks that come down from freedb in <Artist> / <Track Title> format so that when I look at the riped CD afterwards using Mp3tag it has set Artist and Title correctly for each track). The album tag is of course populated with the name of the compilation CD.

Now that I've got this straight, would I be correct in assuming that an artist's tracks from a compilation CD will now appear in the artist listing under the title of the compilation CD?

- Julian

[JJZolx]

Because I'm an idiot and wasn't thinking straight when I typed my first message. I use EAC for my initial tagging so what I meant to type was that the Artist tag at the Album level in EAC is greyed out (and EAC seems to disect the title tracks that come down from freedb in <Artist> / <Track Title> format so that when I look at the riped CD afterwards using Mp3tag it has set Artist and Title correctly for each track). The album tag is of course populated with the name of the compilation CD.

Now that I've got this straight, would I be correct in assuming that an artist's tracks from a compilation CD will now appear in the artist listing under the title of the compilation CD?
No. Not at the present time. There's some confusion over the presentation of compilation CDs, track (compilation) artists and how should be displayed when browsing or searching artists. See:

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1951

and

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2056