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[tonysawford]

I have a large number of compilation albums that are encoded as a mixture of MP3 and MusePack (MPC). The MP3 files have ID3v2.4 tags, and the MPC files have APEv2 tags; in both cases, the album artist is stored in a tag called "ALBUMARTIST".

I use the following thumbnail text in MC's "Albums" and "Recent Albums" views:

Code: [Select]

If(IsEmpty([Album Artist]), [Album Artist (auto)], [Album Artist])
[Name]

When these files are indexed in MC, the MP3-encoded albums are displayed with "Various Artists" as the album artist name, while the MPC ones have "(Multiple Artists)", suggesting that the ALBUMARTIST tag is being interpreted differently in the two cases.

Is this a bug or a feature?

Thanks,
Tony

[Hendrik]

"(Multiple Artists)" is what MC uses to indicate multiple artists with no common match are being grouped up.
Not sure where "Various Artists" come from exactly. Maybe its actually inside the file tags?

[tonysawford]

Sorry - forgot to say in my original post - "Various Artists" is the value of the ALBUMARTIST tag in both cases.

[RD James]

That does seem like a bug if it's not reading the tags. Uploading a track would be the quickest way to get this solved.

The if(…) expression in your post seems redundant.
[Album Artist (auto)] will automatically use the [Album Artist] tags if they have a value.

[tonysawford]

I tried (some time ago, admittedly) just using the Album Artist (auto) variable, but it didn't seem to do what I wanted; maybe I'll give it another go.

I've zipped up a couple of sample tracks - one MP3 and one MPC - and uploaded them to DropBox (because of size restrictions on attachments); you can find them at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5gk4svhzeglgctf/sample_tracks.zip?dl=0

[RoderickGI]

I had to read the thread twice to understand what was happening.

If I may, I will clarify what RD said:

That does seem like a bug if it's not reading the APEv2 ALBUMARTIST tags from the MPC files and saving them into the MC [Album Artist] tag.

And that is exactly the case, when I looked at your two sample files. MC isn't reading the ALBUMARTIST tag from the MPC file, as shown by the [Album Artist] tag being empty in MC after the files are imported.

The MP3 file does have the "Various Artists" value in the [Album Artist] tag of course.

But then I see another issue to resolve. You still have the original Album name in the [Album] field for each track. So MC is going to consider them from two separate Albums, and not combine them into a single Compilation Album. What I do with compilations I create myself is change the [Album] field to a value I assign for the compilation, such as "Compilation - Hard Rock". MC will then treat all included tracks as belonging to the same Album, and [Album Artist (auto)] will work correctly. The downside is that you lose visibility of the source Album in the Compilation Album. Maybe someone has a suggestion on how to get around that. I don't worry about it. Of course if we are talking about a commercial compilation, all Tracks should already have the same value in the [Album] tag, so this wouldn't be an issue.


If you make the above change to the [Album] tag, I would then do as RD says, replace that expression for Album Artist with just the tag, [Album Artist (auto)], then delete the contents of the [Album Artist] tag in MC. MC will then assign "(Multiple Artists)" to [Album Artist (auto)] as intended.

If you don't like that, you could then add back in "Various Artists" to the [Album Artist] tag for all Tracks, and that will show up in the [Album Artist (auto)] tag. Note that when you do that in MC, the original APEv2 ALBUMARTIST tag in the MPC file isn't deleted or overwritten, but a new APEv2 tag called "Album Artist" is written to the MCP file. Once again confirming that MC isn't using the APEv2 ALBUMARTIST tag for MPC files.

BTW, I assume that these compilation albums are actually based on separate copies of the included tracks, and that they are all stored in the same sub-directory together. Otherwise, the above issues get far muddier.

[Hendrik]

Apparently APE tags don't officially define an ALBUMARTIST tag, but I'll add a mapping to our field anyway, and just blame Matt!

[tonysawford]

Thanks, Hendrik