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[ShirazD]

When browsing music on a handheld that has been sync'ed from MC, every handheld I've used uses the track's artist tag but *not* its album artist tag. Thus any multi-artist albums with unique artist titles per track result in 1-track artists, which makes the whole browse-by-artist experience useless. (say you have 10 albums, just one of which is multi-artist, containing 10 tracks. When browsing by artist, you now have 20 artists listed, of which only half are full albums. The rest are just 1 track each).

This has been a problem for me for a long time and I'm sure it's been a problem for many for a long time. There's one simple way that I can see it fixed -- the ability to edit tags on the sync'ed file -- ie. allowing us to set the artist to the album artist. This bypasses this standard limitation on handhelds. I'm still on MC 16 but wondering if by chance it has been implemented in MC 17, or otherwise if it could be implemented in MC 18? Settings-wise, it would fit in nicely in the sync handheld section without complicating things.

Thanks,
Shiraz

[ShirazD]

anyone? i'm sure someone knows something about this... how does everyone else handle their handheld album listings?

[sunfire7]

Would be a good addition to the sync engine.  What handheld do you have? I have an Iphone and it uses the album artist field correctly, I can browse my songs just like on MC, grouped by album artist field if it exists. 

Maybe after sync you can use something like tag&rename to copy the album artist field to artist in one step.

[ShirazD]

thanks for chiming in, sunfire. the handheld in question is actually a USB drive, read by my Sony car stereo deck. The deck is an xav-601BT, which is pretty well the most technologically advanced consumer-level deck out there in the sense that it has Mirrorlink (the touchscreen mirror's your android's screen) and its own OS is based on Android. The fact that even this deck does not intelligently handle multi-artist albums suggests to me that most car decks are like this (the one other one I tried with USB was the same). Aside from that, any old MP3 player I've used has had the same issue (though I'm not an iPhone/iPod person, and am happy to hear Apple's got that right).

so given this would probably be a relatively small amount of work for developers relative to how many people are affected, I think it's probably worthwhile. In the meantime, I've started using a separate MP3 tagger, which is less than ideal against the backdrop of MC-does-everything. As for your suggestion of using MC's existing tag&rename, the problem is, unless I am missing something, J River MC doesn't let you tag files outside of the library, which the handheld files are. I don't want to tag the source files in my library -- the whole point is to preserve track artist for multi-artist albums within the library, and only lose it on the handheld.

Cheers,
Shiraz

[Vincent Kars]

As it is a USB drive you can create a second library in JRiver and point it to the USB drive.

[ShirazD]

ahhh! thank you so much vincent. that is a much better workaround than my current approach. i didn't realize that was possible. i'm also thinking about bailing maintaining artist tag in the source library multi-artist albums, and for those just re-tagging the song title to 'name - artist' so i'll still have the info available.

in any case, it looks like i have some good workaround options now, though still thinking my feature request is a good one given the fairly ubiquitous situation with handhelds lacking album artist browsing.

cheers!

[sunfire7]

Glad you have more workarounds now, and I hope the request could be implemented!