tag fields: Artist vs. Album Artist

[BonneyT214]

I have the following:  the album is "Greg Lake - The Anthology-A Musical Journey". This has songs from the various bands he was in.

The album artist tag is set "Greg Lake". The artist tag is set to the original band (ELP, King Crimson, etc). Poweramp uses the artist field when a song is inserted into the library. So I end up with several different artists having the same one album - with only the songs by that artist. Is there a way to change the scanner so that there is an artist "Greg Lake" (the tagged album artist), with this album under it?

 

TIA

ken

 

[andrewilley]

As long as the Album Title and Album Artist tags match between different tracks, they should be treated as being part of the same album regardless of what the Track Artist tags contain.

But yes, if you use the Artist category then each individually named track artist will be shown separately. You'd need to use the Album Artist category (or just plain Albums) to see all the songs listed together.

Andre

[BonneyT214]

I guess it all comes down to semantics: what qualifies for "artist" or "album artist", as interpreted by an app. Look at this case: an album of music composed by Beethoven, but only one track performed by Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I'd want to have this listed in the library as artist "Beethoven".

This is just how I like to search through my music: artist->album->song. To each his/her/their/its own.

Thanks for the response.

ken

[MotleyG]

11 minutes ago, BonneyT214 said:

I guess it all comes down to semantics: what qualifies for "artist" or "album artist", as interpreted by an app. Look at this case: an album of music composed by Beethoven, but only one track performed by Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I'd want to have this listed in the library as artist "Beethoven".

This is just how I like to search through my music: artist->album->song. To each his/her/their/its own.

Thanks for the response.

If you go to the main Library page, there are options to list both Artist and Album Artist categories. Both are cataloged by Poweramp’s scanning. In most cases the Album Artist list will be much shorter, but in the end that will depend on how many compilation albums you would have.

If you don’t see both, use the three-dot menu on the library page and make sure they are checked so they do appear. There are a few setting as well that can determine how you see these two on lists as well.

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, BonneyT214 said:

I guess it all comes down to semantics: what qualifies for "artist" or "album artist", as interpreted by an app. Look at this case: an album of music composed by Beethoven, but only one track performed by Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I'd want to have this listed in the library as artist "Beethoven".

It's not really down to interpretation, there are specs which have evolved slightly over time to indicate what each specific metadata tag (using ID3 tags for MP3 files, or Vorbis for FLACs, etc) is used for:

So in your example, the Artist tag would contain the performer(s) who played on that track - which might vary from track to track for a compilation album. The Album Artist tag (along with the Album tag) is used to make sure all of those various tracks are still grouped together into one album entity within music player libraries, even though the tracks may have different individual performers. Composer would be "Beethoven".

For example, for the first track you might have:

• Track Number [TRCK / TRACKNUMBER] 1
• Title [TIT2 / TITLE] Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso
• Artist [TPE1 / ARTIST] Sir Georg Solti ; Chicago Symphony Orchestra ; Chorus 
• Album [TALB / ALBUM] Symphony No. 9 In D Minor
• Album Artist [TPE2 / ALBUMARTIST] Beethoven
• Composer [TCOM / COMPOSER] Beethoven

Clearly using "Beethoven" as Album Artist is not actually accurate, as good old Ludwig was obviously not in the studio to supervise this recording - but it's as good a term as any, and more descriptive than "Various Artists" which you'd normally use when each track is performed by someone different.

But I do think, as I said before, that simply viewing the Album Artist library category, rather than just Artist, should do what you want - i.e. Album Artist->Album->Song

Andre