Album Artists confusion

[djdarko]

I recently started using the "Album Artists" list.

I use CUE based albums, and I normally only tag the "Album Artist" for multi-artist albums (soundtracks/compilations etc.)

Up until now, it has worked great, but today I placed some podcast MP3s on my phone, when I noticed that the files are listed as "Unknown artist" as seen below:

Using Foobar2000, I have the "Artist" tag set, but not the "Album Artist".

I'm a bit confused about this, are the are the Album Artist tag requirements different for non-cue based albums?

[invaderzim]

Album Artist tags are required for all (cue, compilation etc) especially if you are to play via the AA category. This is my go-to category for multiple albums by an Artist. What I do is edit an album via my computer and set the AA tag as "AlbumName Various Artists" should it be a compilation album. This way they won't all end up in the "Various Artist" pile if you have that tag. Nonetheless, I don't see any harm having that tag, either.

[andrewilley]

If you are using the Album Artists category, your tracks need to have Album Artist tags. Otherwise, use regular Artist or Album categories.

Andre

[djdarko]

@invaderzim 

Quote

What I do is edit an album via my computer and set the AA tag as "AlbumName Various Artists" should it be a compilation album.

Thanks, could you post a screenshot of how this looks? I'm always interested in updating my own layout. 

 

@andrewilley @invaderzim

Why does the Adele album (shown above) show up correctly without the album artist tag? 

 

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, djdarko said:

Why does the Adele album (shown above) show up correctly without the album artist tag? 

As far as I know it shouldn't. I'm guessing that there may be at least one song file in there that is flagged with an Album Artist tag. You'd need to drill down from the Album Artists view into 'Adele', and whatever album name is visible to see the actual track, and then look at Info/Tags. 

Andre

[djdarko]

3 hours ago, andrewilley said:

As far as I know it shouldn't. I'm guessing that there may be at least one song file in there that is flagged with an Album Artist tag. You'd need to drill down from the Album Artists view into 'Adele', and whatever album name is visible to see the actual track, and then look at Info/Tags. 

Andre

This must be some kind of side effect of using cue based albums, as the Adele example and 1000+ others all show up like that.

[andrewilley]

Possibly, not sure whether PA reads Album Artist data for pseudo-tracks created by CUE files or not.

Personally, I never use CUE files anyway, as it just seems to add a needless layer of complexity for something to go wrong.  I just make sure all my individual music files are tagged correctly when I rip or download them, and let PA do the organising. And if I want to create new groupings, I use Playlists.

Andre

[djdarko]

9 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Possibly, not sure whether PA reads Album Artist data for pseudo-tracks created by CUE files or not.

Personally, I never use CUE files anyway, as it just seems to add a needless layer of complexity for something to go wrong.  I just make sure all my individual music files are tagged correctly when I rip or download them, and let PA do the organising. And if I want to create new groupings, I use Playlists.

Andre

I re-ripped all of my albums in 2015 to use CUE files when I noticed that Poweramp was having problems with seamless playback of some of my files, probably due to AAC not being true gapless.

I think the problem has since been eliminated as of Poweramp V3, but I've continued to use CUE for a few reasons:

1.) It results in less files on my hard drives, and takes less time transferring to my phone, probably due to indexing. (kind of like how transferring 10,000 .txt files (totalling 1mb) would take a long time.)

2.) When using a CUE, you can modify the track start times, so if an album is mastered in a way that a track stats with a unintended "blip" from the previous track, you can just edit the CUE to start the track a few frames later and fix the problem.

3.) I've got bad OCD about labeling my tracks, so if I fix something in the tagging I find the need to also fix the file names to match, which results in double renaming for every track. Using CUE eliminates that aside from naming the artist/album file name itself.