"Artist" and "Album Artists" issue

Confised · Post by **Confised** » Sun Nov 27, 2005 2:01 am

I apologize if this has been asked before. I searched for an answer and couldn't find one.

My problem deals with Artist, and Album Artist not showing up in itunes correctly after I have auto tagged with MM from Amazon.

For instance, I have a lot of compilation albums- and I auto tag them with MM.

In MM after being auto tagged, the Artist (Bing Crosby) and Album Artist (Various Artists) show up correctly for the compilation.

But when I import the folder or file into itunes, only "Various Artists" is shown. It seems that itunes takes the "Album Artist" tag from MM as the "Artist" tag.

Is there a way around this? I would like to see the actual name of the Artist as I do in MM, and not have it show up as "Various Artists" in itunes.

Thanks for your patience.

Post by **Peke** » Sun Nov 27, 2005 1:36 pm

Itunes uses MM Album Artist as Artist in case both are found. It is not MM issue. I can remember that there was some solutions/workarounds for that in forum but some time ago.

confused · Post by **confused** » Sun Nov 27, 2005 3:39 pm

Thanks. I knew it wasn't an MM issue- It had to be an Itunes one.

I'll keep searching for a workaround.

Thanks!

stevem · Post by **stevem** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 2:40 pm

Peke wrote:Itunes uses MM Album Artist as Artist in case both are found. It is not MM issue. I can remember that there was some solutions/workarounds for that in forum but some time ago.

Even if this is an iTunes bug, you'll be able to get more people switching to MM if they can do so in a seemless manner. Many people will want to use both SW for a while (however silly that is). Although this is an iTunes bug, if there was a way it could be worked-around in the MM code --in a way that doesn't break standards-- this would be great.

Some possible solutions:
Does iTunes always do this? What if the "Artist" field is stored in the ID3v2 before the "Album Artist" field? (Or vice-versa?)
Or could there be a multiple artist option:
[X] use the Album Artist ID3 tag. (Better, but may cause problems with iTunes.
[ ] Let MM guess what your compilations are (Compatible with iTunes but slower and less accurate.)

Steve