Album Artist, or not?
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Comments:
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I’m not sure whether I’m going to use Album Artist across my iTunes Library, or not. I’ve already used it in a couple of places, where I have several albums of the same title, such as Greatest Hits, or Behind The Sun. But the other place I may wish to use it is where on an artist’s album there are co-artists for some tracks. The one that springs to mind is Paul Mac, 3000 Feet High. For most of these tracks, Paul Mac credits the singer - generally it was Abby Dobson, Peta Morris, or someone else. The point is, until the advent of Album Artist as a tag, to keep the album together I had Paul Mac as the designated Artist. Then, in the case of a “featuring” credit, which there is on each track in this case except the last two, I put (feat. Additional Artist) into the song Name. Now, I am in a bit of a pickle. I can instead make the Album Artist Paul Mac, and in the Artist field, put Paul Mac featuring Additional Artist. This is all well and good, and the files are stored in the Paul Mac directory, but then I have more artists listed in the Artist browser. Luckily, because I’m somewhat anal with my tagging of tracks, all of my featuring credits are stored as indicated in the song title, so it was easy to create a script that parses the track name, and grabs out the additional artist(s). It is also possible to not add in the Album Artist tag on tracks that are compilations. However, because of the issue indicated above, I haven’t run that script on all of the tracks in my library yet. I’m really not sure which path to take.