>Why would anyone have ALBUMARTIST and COMPILATION=1 on a track ? Is >there a reason for this ? > The Album Artist is just denoting the artist for the album. I don't use the two in combination, but other people may.
In a list of Albums, SBS always shows the album artist name instead of its contributors (either artists or band, depending on prefs setting), so you could go to a list of compilations and order by "artist, album". eg. Consider soundtrack albums, where all songs are by different people, so it's a compilation as it doesn't belong to any one artist on the album, but instead of the Album Artist being "Various Artists", maybe some users would like to set this to "Soundtrack". In the list of albums, you should then get all Soundtracks listed together, and "Various Artists" albums grouped together. I say should, because I just tried it within my list of compilations, and I'm not convinced SBS does the ordering by artist correctly. I haven't got any compilations with different album artist names, but my set of compilations all with "Various Artists" as the artist name, are not then subsequently in alphabetical album order. Maybe it is sorting by the first artist contributor, rather than the album artist? This is why I feel that having "Various Artists" within the Artists list is a bit odd. It's really the collection of compilation albums; some of which may not have Album Artist "Various Artists". Hence, I would think it would be better to have a separate Browse Compilations menu instead. The Browse Albums list would contain the Album Artists irrespective of whether they are compilation albums or not, so there would still be a Various Artists artist, which would only contain albums by that artist (or album artist). >COMPILATION=0 is different, because that is used to force the >individual ARTIST tags to appear directly in the main artist list and I >assume this works also together with an ALBUMARTIST tag. COMPILATION=0 is more than just making individual artists appear in the main list - it means that different artists are not held together on one album. i.e. the album would be split - one album record per different artist. i.e. it's like an anti-Album Artist! COMPILATION=0 and an Album Artist together would therefore be a bit weird - I've never tried it to see what would happen. I don't see a case for using COMPILATION=0; except for if for some strange reason a user rips multiple albums into the same folder, and there are albums with the same name, and thus by default they get combined into one compilation album. COMPILATION=0 would then split the albums into one per artist instead. Better though would be to store each album in its own folder. _______________________________________________ beta mailing list beta@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
