Artist vs Album Artist

[sg60]

Can someone please explain how the tags "Artist" and "Album Artist" differ (at least in the MM universe). I'm currently working on organizing my music using the tags and I've been wondering about this. It seems to have the biggest impact when dealing with compilations. Thanks.

[Teknojnky]

MM uses the album aritst field to group albums.

so, for compilations especially, you want all of the tracks of the album to have the same album artist (they can have different artists).

ie:

<album artist> - <album> - <track> - <artist> - <title>

Various - Warped Tour 2007 - 101 - Alkaline Trio - Fire Down Below

You can use Various, Various Artists, VA, or whatever you want as the common 'album artist'.

for my album artists I use "Various" for regular compilations, "Soundtrack" for soundtracks, and "Techno" for techo/dance compilations.

[drlaban]

Hey all!

I think I'm just being retarded or unnaturaly dense, but I can't really figure out how to make these compilations work as I want them to in the Library.

I'm a bit of a completist and I like to organise stuff in a, what I'd like to say, tidy, structured order.

I'll take one example to give you a feel for what I'm having a bit of a problem with;

In the library, I'd like to group everything that's related to Soundtrack music, within a folder in the Albums section, called "Soundtrack".
At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to force this to happen with the help of Artist, Album Artist, Genre, Album and whatnot and even though I perhaps am close, it's just not sticking.

So, how do I make the following stick in the "Soundtrack" Album-folder in the Library:

Track title: Hard Drivers
Artist: Ekstrak feat Know-1
Album: Need for speed Carbon

I've tried adding "Soundtrack" to Album artist and I'm trying to figure out how to keep the original artist of the song at the same time as flipping the different labels around but it's getting me a bit puzzled.

Any hints about this?

Thanks in advance, I've really started to enjoy this app because of all the extensive features and the community that goes with it!

[Lowlander]

The Album Artist should be set to something like Various or Various Artist to group all songs on an album together for albums with different artists.

You could change Genre to Soundtrack to group them all together. In MediaMonkey 3 you can use multiple genre's so this is a viable solution.

You can also just add the word Soundtrack to each Album and create a AutoPlaylist that has Genre contains Soundtrack as criteria.

[MusicBringer]

You could change Genre to Soundtrack to group them all together. In MediaMonkey 3 you can use multiple genre's so this is a viable solution.

You can also just add the word Soundtrack to each Album and create a AutoPlaylist that has Genre contains Soundtrack as criteria.

Good answers Lowlander
That's the sort of thing I do with Genres and Album Titles.

Handy to know how MM3 handles VA.