I did some more experimenting to see how Rockbox does it. Any track that doesn't have an explicit ALBUMARTIST simply has the artist copied to albumartist in the database. And there doesn't appear to be any special handling of compilations at all. It doesn't recognize compilation tags, identify compilation albums, or treat artists on compilation albums any differently than any other.
What this means is: - You don't have to add ALBUMARTISTs to any album. Artists will end up in album artist list without them. - The way to identify and group compilation albums is to add an ALBUMARTIST, and the string used can be anything you like: "Various", "Compilations", "Various Artists", whatever. - If ARTIST<>ALBUMARTIST then the artist will not appear among the list of album artists. - Having a compilation album with no explicit ALBUMARTIST will mean that the track-artists end up in the album artist browse list. Pros: This is extremely simple. It requires no configuration options, a minimum of additional tagging beyond the standard tags, and requires no post-processing, 'merging' of various artists, or re-evaluating an album's compilation status when a track is added, deleted or changed. Cons: The big drawback is #4 above. Without adding that explicit ALBUMARTIST to keep compilations separate from other albums and to suppress track-artists, you end up with something of a mess. And in Squeezebox Server, where you want to be able to sort albums by artist name, I'm not sure what you'd do with compilation albums with no ALBUMARTIST. All you could do is use one of the track artists for sorting, which is not good. It's the automatic detection of compilation albums by Squeezebox Server that lets it function without _any_ additional tagging beyond the standard artist, album, title and track. No need for ALBUMARTIST or COMPILATION tags at all. -- JJZolx ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84475 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
