>On thing I was worried about beforehand, was how SC would deal with >albums that feature different artists, such as compilations or jazz >albums with guest musicians. What I want, basically, is for the >software to use the "album artist" ID3 tag when browsing by artists. > SqueezeCenter is the best app that I have used for handling album artists and compilations, and it will do everything you need it to.
When browsing artists, albums will be listed under their album artist. If there is no album artist, and there are many performing artists on the album, the album will considered a compilation. Compilation albums will be listed by default under "Various Artists". Artists performing only on albums that have a defined album artist or on compilation albums can be configured to not be listed when browsing artists. However, be careful what you mean by the "album artist" id3 tag, because officially there isn't one. Many apps use an id3v2.3 tag (called TPE2) that is meant to be used for storing Band/Orchestra information, and call this "Album Artist". SC by default, reads the tag for it's true meaning, and will not group songs by this Band tag, so by default albums with many performing artists will appear as compilation albums. SC also supports another custom tag (called TXXX ALBUMARTIST), so you have support for declaring albums to be by a certain artist, rather than listed as compilations, whilst also retaining the ability to have band/orchestra information, eg. for classical music. SC can be configured to fall back into a compatibility mode for mp3 files, where the id3v2.3 Band tag is interpretted as Album Artist. _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
