ID3 Tag strangeness…

[Dave.B]

Hello again. It’s been a few weeks now since I managed (with your help) to get mt-daapd running on my slug, and I can say quite happily that I’m more than happy with it.

I have a query though: All my compilation albums are tagged with “Various Artists” in the “Album Artist” tag, and the artist name in the “Artist” tag, the normal way, if you see what I mean. However, for some tracks the Soundbridge just disaplys “Various Artists”, and others it will display the proper artist name.

I have double checked that my files are tagged properly, and I can’t see why one file would be OK, and another one not be.

I will admit that all my files were/are being tagged by WMP10. I read somewhere about a “Compilation” tag, but I can’t find how to set this.

I’m baffled, anyone know?

[rpedde]

I don’t know that I properly deal with the distinction between “album artist” and “artist”. iTunes doesn’t know the difference between the two, so I think I ignore “album artist” unless there is no “artist” set, and then I use “album artist” as “artist”. If that makes sense.

I’d have to double-check that, but I believe that’s what I’m doing… for WMA, that is.

If these are really mp3 files, then I’m not sure *where* wmp puts album artist. It might be in what usually is considered “Composer”. I dunno.

I guess I’d have to see one of those to see.

As far as the compilation tag, I don’t know if you can add that tag with WMP. To work around it, you can use the “compdirs” directive in your mt-daapd conf. You can fill it with comma separated “path segments” that match those files that are compilations. Might set it to something like “Various,Various Artists,Soundtrack,OST” or something. They they will get marked as compilations, and iTunes can browse them better.

As far as the other, you can email me a file that doesn’t look like you expect and I can take a look at it.

You can email it to ron at pedde.com.

— Ron

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