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[CadErik]

I have lots of electronic music in my library and the usual way the metadata is written is a little annoying with MC:
- artists have frequently "feat." or "ft." in their name such "Freemasons feat. Sophie Ellis blabla...", so an album from Freemasons ends up with 20 different artists
- for the same reason, cover art lookup fails 90% of times
- there is no place for the remixer in the usual fields and this data is usually in the song title, however it would be nice to have that data in a separate place so I can just look at all "Whitney Houston" - "Million Dollar Bill" remixes with possibly a view with all remixers in the tree

I'm considering writing a C# plugin to scan and fix that type of metadata but I was curious if anyone has suggestions on how to handle it and where to store each field without using custom metadata...

Erik.

[Alex B]

You could tag the Album Artist field with the value Freemasons. The Album Artist (auto) field would then automatically show the same value. If you use the Album Artist (auto) field as the main artist definition in your views the album tracks will be correctly grouped. If the Album Artist value is not yet tagged the automatic value is (multiple artists) for albums that contain various artist values.

A search for Sophie Ellis works even if she included only as a part of the name string, but in addition you could create an additional semicolon delimited list field for storing several artists per each track. You can create new views that include this custom field.

Regarding "without using custom metadata", the basic, default fields are closely tied with the online CD database and there is no simple way to change the established db structure. However, you can use all kinds of custom metadata in MC. It is one of the advantages you have, not a problem.

[MrHaugen]

I've done what Alex suggests. I'm using the Album Artist (auto) field. It works well. I don't know how this would work with cd lookup though. I'm used to doing this manually. I'm not risking letting a incomplete album or a album with errors in my collection

[CadErik]

You could tag the Album Artist field with the value Freemasons.

Thanks!!! This does the trick - album cover lookup also works this way :-)
I will probably customize my library and create a "remixer" field.
Next I'll write a C# plugin to clean my database and correct all this stuff automatically

[HTPC4ME]

i too have alot of dance,rock,rap music that has featuring in it. and i would love to make my artist's view alot smaller by removing or moving the featuring from the artist name, and be able to click on say Jay-z as artist and it will show all his work including the feat with eminem.  and then be able to click on artist eminem and see all his work, with Jay-z Feat. under the eminem artist name.

so if we leave our artists as freemasons feat.  and fill in album artist with the artist name freemasons. when we go to theaterview or artist view in standard view we will see only one artist... freemasons with all there work inside(including the feat.)?

thanks for any clarification.

[MrHaugen]

This approach would screw up a lot of possible automatic meta data services in the future.

I use xxxx feat. yyyy in the Artist tag, and use the album artist in the Album artist Field. If I want to see all songs by an artist, I use the search.

I WOULD like to use another list library field with all artists on a track separated, but it would be messy in Theater View I think. You can probably list all artists by combining more fields or all artists in list library field, but you would have trouble with the "feat." and similar words.

[bunglemebaby]

Personally, I go with the approach of removing all "featuring" type data from the Artist field. MusicBrainz seems to do this also, so there's at least one automatic metadata source that works with this method. For the "featured" artist, I use a field generically called "Musicians" that I use for other purposes also. For example, as an electronic music fan, you might have a number of songs/albums made by Richard D. James under various pseudonyms (Aphex Twin, AFX, Polygon Window, etc). For me, this is the best mix of simple and clean when used in conjunction with the search box (my musicians field is set as a default search field).

so if we leave our artists as freemasons feat.  and fill in album artist with the artist name freemasons. when we go to theaterview or artist view in standard view we will see only one artist... freemasons with all there work inside(including the feat.)?

As long as you've got your views set up to use [album artist (auto)] instead of [artist], yes that's exactly how it will work.

-JB

[The Mastermind]

I put the featuring artist in with the song title. That's often how it appears when it downloads from the databases anyway.

The remixer field is not a bad idea.