>I'm going to subscribe to this thread and I'll be eagerly awaiting the >results of your test. > I've been struggling to find the perfect test disk.
I obviously don't want a disk that is a compilation, because there should not be an album artist on compilation disks. I wanted to find a popular CD that is associated with one artist but clearly has a single track by a guest artist. I thumbed through my collection of CDs, and couldn't immediately find one. I thumbed through a bit slower considering "best of" albums in particular. I have found one CD that vaguely fits the bill. "Pretenders - The Singles". The last track (number 16) is "I Got You Babe" is not a Pretenders track. It's performed by UB40 with Chrissie Hynde as a guest artist. God knows why it was included on this Pretenders greatest hits album, because it's not Pretenders song (and it's crap!). Anyway, I tried loading this into EAC, my ripper of choice. This identified the album as being by The Pretenders. Track 16 is titled "I Got You Babe (performed by UB40 with Chrissie Hynde", and the artist is "The Pretenders". Then I tried ripped dbPowerAmp. I have issues with dbPowerAmp as a ripper: 1. dbPowerAmp doesn't seem to retrieve AccurateRip as accurately as my EAC configuration. Most tracks were reported as having an accuracy of 2, except for one that didn't have any submissions (accuracy cannot be determined), and one ripped track failed to match AccurateRip data. EAC on the other hand ripped with an accuracy of 5 or 6 on each track, and all ripped tracks matched. 2. When I rip to FLAC, it seems to really mess up writing tags to the flac files. It seems to write ID3v2.3 tags (rather than using flac tags for some reason), but they are not readable in Mp3Tag. For this reason, I can't really compare what has been written, other than by using what dbPowerAmp reports it has tagged in the files. Anyway, dbPowerAmp identified the album with the same information - the same artist on each track, with the dodgy track title for track 16. This album in my experience is typical of what I have found with many guest appearances on albums, and cements my point that for the majority of users, there is no issue with needing to resolve "album artist" tagging issues. There is one artist for all tracks, so the album will appear in SC as a normal album. For anyone unhappy with the guest artist(s) appearing in the track title, they would need to go into a tag editor and do some manipulation. I personally in this case would change the artist tag to ARTIST="UB40" and ARTIST="Chrissie Hynde" (i.e. two distinct artist tags). I'd then set ALBUM ARTIST="The Pretenders" for all songs. I'd also then correct each YEAR tag in this case to be the year that each single was released (but that's irrelevant for this discussion). My guess is that the vast majority of users would not bother - they would be happy with the album appearing as a single album in SC - probably wouldn't even notice that the song was reported as by The Pretenders, and the artist embedded in the song title. Some people probably actively prefer the tags to be entered that way. I also tried ripping in iTunes (not a pleasant experience either), and found that it set the artist of track 16 to "UB40 feat. Chrissie Hynde". "album artist" was blank. Part of a compilation was not ticked. So that's screwed up - no app would display that correctly. iTunes displays this as two albums (the first by The Pretenders containing tracks 1-15, and a second album of the same name by "UB40 feat. Chrissie Hynde". >I want all my albums to be listed by Album Artist (or Band, I don't >mind which as I can set these to be the same). I want to record each >track artist but when I'm scrolling through my albums I want to see >only the album artists. > You'll have to explain a specific issue you see. >I don't think it's possible with SC. Perfectly possible with SC, if your tags are consistent. Phil _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
