But the Pane view won't give a way to do what I linked to & Glynor's .xls above. Furthermore if you are using Artist as the default field it is not an accurate reflection of the Artists if you have different Artist tags on an album and have not set Album Artist to the default artist. I often use the Artist field to retain original Artist info as given on 45's; these can vary greatly.
For example, Baba Brooks was a Jamaican ska/blue beat trumpeter and I have listings as:
Baba Brooks
Bab Brooks Band
Baba Brooks & His Almighty Ska Band
Baba Brooks Band
Baba Brooks & Dizzy Moore
etc.
Commonly, you'll have an album where one track will have a duet or someone who joins in etc. and you want to mention it. The problem here is that you have Artist filed empty - fill it with Baba Brooks. Now you have Album Artist (Auto) accurately reflecting "what's going on" on the album. Now you decide to modify track 3 because you notice in the liner notes that Dizzy Moore is playing trumpet along with Baba Brooks. Change Artist to Dizzy Moore and Album Artist (Auto) now dictates that there are two of these albums; one with with only one track. Some have argues that you could simply add this extra info into the Name field or somewhere else but it makes sense to have it here, it's intuitive. And MC makes a nice provision in that you can simply decide to use Album Artist to retain Baba Brooks under both Album Artist & Album Artist (auto). But this field, Album Artist, is not initially filled even when you start tagging all the files on the album with the same artist, so if you make a change in Artist as noted above you should use the Copy Field function.
This all works great except for the problem of Multiple Artist discs. If you have a lot of these compilations, mixes, etc. and want to retain accurate Stats then you want to keep them as Multiple Artists = 1 Disc. I didn't like browsing through Artist Album (auto) (which unifies all of Baba Brooks' various name incarnations under "Baba Brooks") and when I enter the Baba Brooks tile....that is not all of his music in there. There may be 5,10, even 20 tracks that are "stuck" in the (Multiple Artists) Tile. I am sure there is another way around this but my solution was to create a new field (Album Artist (Custom)) to accomodate this since I like to have all an Artist's work under one Tile. Another reason to not use Artist is that if you have a TON of multiple artist discs, this field gets cluttered. You end up with very esoteric and unknown artist "cluttering" your browsing. Imagine a library of 200,000 songs; the Artist field looks whack. It's simply overwhleming. But you can keep it as a seperate view and then have a trimmed down version where you run through all the comps. and when you see "big name" artists or your favorites who already have their own entire albums and Tiles, you add only select choices to your custom field; the result is a much more clean browse. You can still have all your other views by Album or Artist or play entire Genres on shuffle but this is just something that unites the two ideas I mentioned....1. to pull out artists from the Multiple Artists Tile and make a comprehensive listing of their work under one Tile (e.g. Bob Dylan contains Bob Dylan & The Band, Bob Dylan & The Hawks, Dylan & The Dead, Dylan & Clapton) 2. make a custom view scheme which reflects more popular artists or favorites that is realistic to peruse (i.e. free of one hit wonders).
You can read the entire ramble here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=32740.msg231764#msg231764Now some poeple don't want this but I think if want to have your collection as albums you can have simply another view for that, which I do. LunchmeatVoom says, "I like to view my collection as "albums" ie. what I would have if I was still using vinyl or CDs.
I don't want my folder for Elton John (read John, Elton) to include random tracks here and there of whatever compilations he might be on."
I have a seperate scheme for this; no text under Tiles and Albums listed in order by Album Artist (Custom). It's like flipping through a large CD book ordered by Artist.
My point is that if I were to use Artist, I would retain maybe 5,000 artists when many would be various spelling changes, naming schemes, or duets and realistically I would have only 3700 unique artists. The nice thing is you can use a custom field as descirbed for viewing but still retain Album Artist (auto) for stats & also you have Artist for display name of the actual playing track which gives you the definitve info on who is actually playing, singing, or jamming on the track w/o resorting to another field.
DC
