I'm not going to reply to all sub-threads, it's getting out of hand. Let's settle the air a bit.
I don't have any problem with TPE2 being used to represent album artist. I didn't mind that the option to select whether it meant Band or Album Artist contributor role was added to the scanner. I don't even particularly mind if it were the default for new users. What I was concerned with at the time was if it replaced the existing functionality, or changed the way things worked for existing users without warning. I was also against it setting *BOTH* Band AND Album Artist, as that would have caused incorrect behaviour. I'm happy with the outcome, and that it helps other users out. Who knows, in the future I may even decide to change to TPE2=Album Artist - if there were suitable alternative custom tags supported in SC for me to read Band/Orchestra information from instead. Typically it doesn't really concern me much, because I now rip to FLAC with FLAC tags. I don't really use other media player apps much (Foobar for desktop playback because of the SoftSqueeze/SqueezePlay fiasco, and iTunes just for syncing a small sub-set of my library to an iPod Nano, although I mainly use the iPod for PodCasts). SC meets my needs, so I make the most out of the functionality it provides. In my experience of ripping CD albums, applications don't often set TPE2 content. I'm sure most apps do set TPE2 for mp3 id3v2.3 tags when the user enters what the app calls "Album Artist", but in my experience, metadata sources do not often set this. Of course, there's nothing to stop a user manually entering it, but I don't see why users would do that, for the cases when it is not necessary, which it most frequently is not. i.e. when all songs on an album are by the same artist, only artist tags are retrieved and album artist is blank. I don't think free.db holds any album artist data, or at least Mp3Tag, a very popular tagging app never sets TPE2 for me when I have used it to retrieve metadata. EAC never sets Album Artist for me either (I rip to FLAC these days). I must admit that I don't know too much about Gracenote, as I haven't used any apps that have retrieved from that metadata source. I did query albums via a web interface, and didn't notice album artist information in the results, but it's not a full test. But free.db is the most popular free source of metadata. Almost all rippers/tagging apps seem to support it. Compilation albums in free.db are most frequently stored as ARTIST=Various and the song title containing the performing artist name. Album Artist is not set. I just tried ripping albums in iTunes as a comparative test. I picked two compilation albums and had a look at the results. It automatically found the metadata for both albums (I assume it gets metadata from their own iTunes store and perhaps from other sources too). All songs on both albums had "Part of compilation"=Yes, and each Artist tag was set to the performing artist. Album Artist (TPE2) was left blank. All such albums from iTunes or free.db source would be displayed adequately in SC without needing to change any tags. _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
