-i read the request about 'multiple artist' and i agree that having them labeled as this would be a huge benefit for my compilation albums. i can see how some people might not want it though and i was wondering if it might be possible to allow us to be able to chose between the two methods.
dark angel, I too hope that J River will not only restore but expand this functionality to the Zen plugin. I don't care whether the functionality is different for different players, I just want the best functionality for MY player. Ah well....
Until J River changes its mind, here's a workaround. Great a new tag field called Artists (plural, that is, as opposed to the standard singular). Use the Library Tools -> Move/Copy Fields to copy the contents of the Artist field to the Artists field (this creates a backup of the original Artist field). Now use the same function to copy the contents of the Album Artists (auto) field to the Artist field. Now when you transfer files to the Zen, your compilations will have "Multiple Artists" as the artist. In MC, if you want to compilations to display that way, set the column to either Album Artist (auto) or Artist. If you want to see the individual artists in the compilation in MC, set the column type to Artists.
I use a similar scheme to overcome the fact that on the Zen you can't sort by artist within a genre, but go straight to an album view. (Note that this method works becuase I store the mp3s in each album in a folder that follows the naming scheme of "artist - album"). I created a custom tag field called Albums. I use the copy field command to copy the Album tag to Albums. Then I use the get properties from filename command, checking only the directory button and assigning the directory to the Album tag, to fill the Album tag with artist - album. In MC I set the column for the album names to Albums to show only the album title (because I have a column showing the artist just to the left of the album column), but in the Zen, albums will display as, for example, "Emmylou Harris - Angel Band", so when I go into the country genre and scroll, I'll see all of Emmylou's albums grouped together.
The problem with these workarounds is that your standard tags no longer hold the standard information. That's not a problem as long as you stay within the world of MC, because of the flexibility you have in how to display tags. But if you wanted to give the files to someone else, you'd have to restore the contents of your custom fields to the standard fields first.
That's why in an ideal world MC would allow us to map any MC tag to any Zen tag, and better yet, concatinate tags (so you could map your MC Artist and Album tags to the Zen as "Artist - Album", so you could get things to display the way you wanted in the Zen without screwing up the standard tag contents. Hopefully, J River will do that one day. It would be a killer feature.
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Topic: NOMAD JUKEBOX / ZEN (Read 43003 times)