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[Sam]

Question for the community:

How do people deal with songs that are performed by more than one artist?

Multiple names in the artist field?  Custom field for the second artist?  Or is there some clever feature in MC that takes care of it?

Thanks.

[loraan]

There are a number of ways you could approach this. Media Center supports "List" type fields. A "List" type field can store multiple values, separated by a semicolon. So, if the Artist field contained "Dave Matthews;Jerry Garcia", MC would show the song under both of those artists in the view schemes and smartlists. It would NOT show the song under the single artist, "Dave Matthews;Jerry Garcia".

One problem with this approach is that MC doesn't let you change the type of default fields, such as Artist. So you'd need to define a custom field and use that field for multi-artist tracks. For example, you could use the standard Artist field for the "primary" artist and define a second field, maybe named, "Multiple Artists" or "All Artists". That field could be "List" type.

Another reason that you don't want to change the standard "Artist" field is that the "Artist" field for most formats (MP3, WMA) is standardized. That means that if you tried to use it to store list-type data, most other (non-MC) programs would get confused.

Personally, for multi-artist tracks, I just store the primary artist in the Artist field and leave it at that. I put "Easy Lover" under Phil Collins even though there's some other famous guy on that track too. Michael Stipe sings on the Indigo Girls song, "Kid Fears", but when I'm looking for that song, I think, "Indigo Girls". But I just don't have that many multi-artist tracks, so it's not much of an issue for me.

[Sam]

Thanks.  I wasn't aware of the list type fields.

I don't know if this is a big deal for other users, but perhaps a useful new feature would be to allow you to make Artist a list type field, but convert it to a normal field with one artist when you export to a handheld or burn a CD...

[crowfan]

I put the "primary" artist in the Artist field and put the other name in the song title, like this:

Title: Baby Grand (with Ray Charles)
Artist: Billy Joel

not the most elegant solution but it works...

crow

[jleerigby]

The best example of this is with image tagging where you have the family, the dog and the cat in a photo and you want them all listed in the tag.  I dont do images, but Doof does, and she is rather good at explaining it.

Hope she'll be along soon.

[JollyJim]

I put the primary artist in 'Artist' and have set up a custom field called 'With' for the secondary artist. 'With' is only displayed in appropriate views...works fine except it does'nt drop onto the playlist in CD Labeller.

Jim

[NoCodeUK]

Hate to break this to you JLee but Doof is a guy!!  Check his profile...

Adam

[knickelfarz]

He sad he won't do it again But here is some tinned food:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=10495;start=msg64551#msg64551

[Mirko]

I put the "primary" artist in the Artist field and put the other name in the song title, like this:

Title: Baby Grand (with Ray Charles)
Artist: Billy Joel

not the most elegant solution but it works...

I do something similar. I put the artists in "artist", if they are equaly important (e.g. Aguilera & Martin) and into the title if not "No Angels - Blabla (remixed by Mousse T.)" - but I think about making a new field for this "mixing"-info (has some negative effects like not easy seeing the difference of two versions of the same song - different subject).

Mirko