ok, so other threads are all over the place. what i want to do in this thread is establish some facts.
TPE2 is a tag that by spec is for Band/Orchestra. http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0 however, almost no one uses it that way. while some undoubtably do, and they are correct to do so b/c thats by spec, they are a tiny minority overall. the fact is that today, like it or not, the vast majority share of the marketplace of music apps has "hijacked" TPE2 to represent the so called "Album Artist" field. basically what has happened is that major apps, like winamp, windows media player, and itunes, have decided of their own accord to take TPE2 and use it the way they want to, spec be damned. this is what is known as a "de facto standard." when software from differing (and competing) sources nevertheless have functional agreement on something that is not official, it is a de facto standard. now, i do not endorse this, i merely recognize it. and after a lot of effort on my part, (and ridiculous inexplicable resistence from others) i got slim to recognize it too. that resulted in bug 8001 being adopted. http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8001 it allows a user to tell the scanner to read TPE2 tags into the SC DB as "Album Artist" instead of "Band." in other words, where TPE2 used to always populate the SC DB 'band' field, it now left that blank, and instead populates the SC DB 'album artist' field, (or so i am told). this is great, and it means that SC can now finally work in an expected manner for average mp3 users who got their content from the mainstream apps, (or p2p or wherever that had TPE2 data). these average users probably wouldn't even know that TPE2 had been hijacked, all they'd know is that all their other apps had an "album artist" field that was great for sorting and so on, so why didn't their files work with SC the same way? the option explains this then, to a degree in the wording of the setting itself, and to a much fuller extent in the infobox by the setting. so if a user has a confusing exp at first with SC, they should be able to figure it out in the settings, and get SC to be congruent. fast forward then to recent posts here: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53718 that thread eventually led to this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53822 and at that point, a lot of things started getting conflated b/c of, imo, Phils rigid SC-centric views, as well as somewhat off topic (or perhaps better stated as) other tangental posts. again, i am not endorsing anything, i am just acknowledging marketplace reality. (keep in mind, SC does NOT create content EVER. it uses what is made by others, and as it strives to become more consumer, ie. mainstream logitechish itself, it has to align with the marketplace majority) lets restate the reality of the apps: WINAMP calls TPE2 "album artist" does not support comp tags uses CDDB aka Gracenote to autotag and rip-tag, which ALWAYS fills in TPE2. WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER calls TPE2 "album artist" does not support comp tags (afaik) uses something, maybe a combo of sources, to autotag and rip-tag, and ALWAYS fills in TPE2. [keep in mind, when i say ALWAYS, i mean ALWAYS. comp or not, it fills it in] ITUNES calls TPE2 "album artist" does support comp tags (and might be the only mainstream app to do so?) i'm not sure if itunes uses 'TCMP' or 'TXXX itunescompilation' or both? i do not know what itunes uses for tagging source, or what it does when it rips / autotags. but i do know it calls TPE2 album artist, so thats the main thing. it also has some weird thing called "grouping." i know nothing about that. OTHERS i'm not sure what else out there matters, i don't think anything has a market share comparable to those 3. music match is now some weird yahoo crap, real networks seems to have fallen off the map too, and i don't know what else you might name... but they call TPE2 album artist as well. now, what i just wrote above is the fact. like it or not, TPE2 = album artist = de facto standard. i don't endorse it, i simply recognize it. in my next post i will spell out just what i think the implications of these facts should be, vis a vis SC. -- MrSinatra www.LION-Radio.org Using: Squeezebox2 (primary) / SBR (secondary) / SBC - w/SC 7.3b - Win XP Pro SP3 - 3.2ghz / 2gig ram - D-Link DIR-655 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MrSinatra's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2336 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=54635 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
