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[MusicBringer]

Hello Folks, I am new here.
I am trying to understand what "Artist" means to JRMC18, and how it differs to Album Artist, and then again how that differs to Album Artist (Auto) whatever that means!

For example take Bob Marley.
I want ALL his stuff listed under his name. Which means that I want to see tracks by Bob Marley, Bob Marley & the Wailers, and indeed just The Wailers.
My Artist tags are specified by the performer such as:
Artist=Bob Marley, or Artist=Bob Marley & the Wailers, or Artist=The Wailers.

Where Album Artist=Bob Marley.

So where does Album Artist (Auto), whatever that means, fit in.

Do my tags conform the the requirements of JRMC18?
Thanks,

[MusicBringer]

May I give another example.

Let's consider Rod Stewart.
He has sung in many bands and I want all these tracks listed under his name.
I have tracks from his association with Long John Baldry, with Steampacket, and with Brian Auger. And then of course Jeff Beck, and then Faces, Rod Stewart and the Faces, Rod Stewart/Faces [Coast to Coast].

I have the performer in the Artist Field, yet I want the tracks he sang on listed under his name.

Typically, Anthology albums are particularly tricky to specify.
The same song is likely to be on both the Rod Stewart Anthology and the Ron Wood Anthology.
Any ideas please.
Thanks,

PS. Yes I have read http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Album_Artist_and_Album_Artist_%28Auto%29

[Rubberduck0]

This can be tricky sometimes:

Artist: is used to have all the artists of a track, strongly recommended to be separated with a ; semicolon (then MC treats this as a list, which is better for some built-in functions, however for your own calculated fields beware that the standard return value of this field is the first artist only, to get all artist use [Artist,0])

Album Artist: usually has one name only and is the main artist of the album

Album Artist (auto): is a calculated field to get the main artist in an easy way. You cannot enter something in this field.

What you could do:
Write "Bob Marley", "Bob Marley & the Wailers", "The Wailers" in the Album Artist field.
Write "Bob Marley", "Bob Marley; The Wailers", "The Wailers; Bob Marley" in the Artist field respectively.
(Note: For the first and third case you could leave the Album Artist field empty with the same result, but I'd recommend to use it)

Album Artist (auto) and all the views in MC should display the correct artist name (e.g. third case: "The Wailers"). Therefore "The Wailers" will be listed under "T" or "W" (if you set to ignore articles).
But if you search for "Bob Marley", or if you click on that little arrow in front of the artist name for Bob Marley, then you will still find all albums (all three cases).

This method should also work for Rod Stewart

[kstuart]

Here is my take on the situation:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=78390

" One good thing about music... when it hits you, you feel no pain."

[csimon]

I have a different take on it!

I've created a custom tag called Sort Artist for those situations where I want albums grouped together in a way that is not defined by Artist or Album Artist.  My "artist" level in the views is an expression that uses Sort Artist if it contains something otherwise uses Album Artist.  I therefore only need to populate Sort Artist if I want it to be different from Album Artist.

My example is Adam Ant. He made albums under the name of Adam & The Ants and also Adam Ant. Therefore those albums are correctly tagged with an Album Artist of either Adam & The Ants or Adam Ant.  BUT for my own browsing purposes, I would prefer to see all albums indexed under Adam Ant, I don't want to see separate entries.  Therefore I put Adam Ant into Sort Artist.

It also works great for actual sorting. I can leave both Artist and Album Artist as Michael Jackson so that it reads nicely when metadata is displayed, but put Jackson, Michael into Sort Artist and that's how it gets sorted.

[Rubberduck0]

Typically, Anthology albums are particularly tricky to specify.
The same song is likely to be on both the Rod Stewart Anthology and the Ron Wood Anthology.

This problem is not solvable right now as MC cannot link a track to multiple albums. This is a typical problem with compilations and movie soundtracks where tracks appear, which are also on an original artist album.
Either you have multiple files for the same song (for each album it appears on). Or you have one file only and associate it to the most "original" album *).

Regarding the Artist field in case you have the same song multiple times, i.e. multiple files, associated with different albums: you could fill the Artist and Album Artist fields as suitable for the release, e.g. "Ron Wood" in one case and "Rod Stewart" in the ther.

*) This is what I do, I list a track on the first album it appears on and try to avoid "Best of..." albums, and those tracks will not appear on compilation albums and soundtracks. The main reason is, that by doing this, the album year (which should be the same for all tracks on the same album) is the release year of the track, and therefore it is very easy to make smartlists with "Music from the 60s & 70s", "Musiv from the 80s & 90s", etc.

By the way, a nice and sophisticated solution from csimon, although I am not sure if I'd recomend it to a newbie struggling with the differences between Artist, Album Artist, etc.