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[MarkS]

May seem like an idiotic question, but what exactly is the deal with the "Album Artist" Field (ID3?)? What are people using it for? Aren't seperate "Album" and "Artist" fields enough? Thanks.

[KingSparta]

id3v2 has allot of fields, most of them are not used.

[MarkS]

Can I change the names of some of these fields in MJ, as I do the 3 custom fields? Thanks.

[Doof]

Album Artist is an MJ specific field that you can use for Mix Albums when each track has a different artist.

So you set Album Artist to whatever you want for the entire album and MJ will put just one entry in Media Library for that entire album instead of several entries (one for each artist).

You have to use it in conjunction with a Media View that uses the Album Artist attribute instead of Artist.

[KingSparta]

i don't have MJ in front of me but you have

Name = (Song Title)

Artist = Name Of Artist

And

Album = Album Name

i don't think mj has a field for "artist and album" combined

not unless thats part of the id3v2 extended tags

[cjdshaw]

KingSparta > MJ does have a field called "Album Artist". For compilations, it would be set to Various while each track would have it's correct Artist tag. MJ seems to handle this field specially though. The default Artist/Album view scheme is actually set to Album Artist/Album, but if Album Artist isn't set, it uses Artist instead.
This can cause some problems though. Most of my compilations have Album Artist set to Various, but one was set to "Various artists". I dragged it into Various in the tree, thinking it would change the Album Artist tag, but instead it changed all the Artist fields and I had to reset them by hand.

[KingSparta]

I am back home now

ok, i see it

[Callithumpian]

I find it most useful to have AlbumArtist set to the Album Name, rather than "Various" or "Assorted", for compilations discs.

EG "Disco til You Die" has 38 different artists.
I set the AlbumArtist to "Disco til You Die" and in the tree view it just shows the single AlbumArtist rather than extending the artist list ridiculously with 38 one hit wonder groups.

Similarly the AlbumArtist for the Album "An Evening with Windham Hill" is "Windham Hill".

"AlbumArtist" is a valid search criteria, in case you didn't know.
And a search field of "-AlbumArtist=[]" returns all the tracks for which AlbumArtist is blank - ie not compilation albums