I should have been more clear - 'guest artists' was the wrong term and misleading. The use case I refer to is when there are one or two tracks by another artist on an album - not just tracks by the releasing artist plus another 'featured' artist. This happens surprisingly often. Personally I'm happy to put featured artists in the trakc title, or even in a custom TXXX field.<br>
<br>Regardless of that, you do make some good points about TPE2, but here's the thing:<br><br><b>Users care about functionality. They don't care how that functionality is achieved.</b><br><br>So while we sit here and quibble about standards and compliance and implementation details, iTunes and WMP "do whatever they want" ie they are free to <b>innovate</b>. This means you can comply with standards until you're blue in the face; you're still going to bleed market share to apple and microsoft when users see things like Coverflow, or the fact that suddenly they see 500 artist entries when sorting their albums instead of 3,000 (this is the difference between Artist and Album Artist).<br>
<br>I don't care whether we use TPE2, custom tags, or voodoo magic to get Album Artist support - all I care about is that I can see those 300 artists whose albums I own, instead of the 2000 artists scattered across the numerous compilations and collaborations in my music collection. I'd bet 100 bucks the average music enthusiast feels exactly the same way.<br>
<br>You try to dismiss my description of using TPE2 as Album Artist as a de facto standard by claiming that iTunes and WMP somehow don't count bacause they do what they like. But they are the two biggest players in terms of market share. Let's take a look at who uses TPE2 to represent Release Artist, and decide whether the term 'de facto standard' is appropriate or not.<br>
<br>Players which call TPE2 "album artist":<br> <b>Winamp</b><br> <b>Windows media player</b><br> <b>iTunes</b><br> <b>Realplayer</b><br> <b>Songbird</b> (with AlbumArtist plugin)<br><b> Squeezebox</b>/<b>SqueezeCenter</b><br>
<br>Sure sounds like the de facto standard to me..<br><br>That being said, if we do implement it we should try to do something sensible. For example, I have tagged all my music in Musicbrainz Picard, and this adds Album Artist information. Where does it put it? That would seem to me to be a good place to start in terms of supporting a sensible (pseudo) standard. Picard is open source tool like Amarok, and the Musicbrainz community have put a lot of thought into exactly the kinds of problems we're coming up against with music metadata like this.<br>
<br>XMMS suggested an interesting way of dealing with the problem of deifferent people using tags in different ways - ie some people might actually use TPE2 to store the accompanying orchestra/ensemble. It does this by letting you customize a profile that essentially defines what each tag means to you. There's a summary of the idea here: <a href="http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/wiki/Metadata_profiles">http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/wiki/Metadata_profiles</a><br>
<br>Another way forward would be to allow sorting/grouping of collections by arbitrary fields, though this is not possible under the current implementation, and most of the ways to do this would likely require schema changes (ie are not likely to happen).<br>
<br>Ben<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/4/1 Jeff Mitchell <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mitchell@kde.org">mitchell@kde.org</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">Michael Pujos wrote:<br>
> Jeff Mitchell a écrit :<br>
>> Album: Crazy Techno vol 2<br>
>> Album Artist: Ministry of Sound<br>
>> Artist: TechnoDude<br>
>> Track Title: Blowing Your Mind<br>
>> Featuring: John Blaze<br>
>><br>
>> This isn't a far-fetched example by any means -- in fact, it's quite<br>
>> common -- but clearly "John Blaze" belongs in TPE2, not "Ministry of<br>
>> Sound". So where do you put "John Blaze" if you've filled TPE2 with<br>
>> "Ministry of Sound"? Will anyone show it if you put it in TCOM or TOPE?<br>
>><br>
>> There is only one purely cross-player solution to the Album Artist<br>
>> problem in ID3, which is, don't do it.<br>
> In you example above, i'd put John Blaze in a custom tag (TXXX frame)<br>
> since there's no standard frame for the "Featuring" credit.<br>
<br>
</div>Which proves my point. Now you're putting information in custom tags,<br>
which are totally fine for one player, but are not cross-player<br>
compatible (unless they hack in support for each others' frames).<br>
<div class="im"><br>
>> ID3 sucks, but the right way to<br>
>> fix it is to form an industry group to hammer out a newer version that<br>
>> fixes these problems.<br>
> This won"t happen ever: ID3V2 2.4 is a 9 year old standard and most<br>
> software / hardware players do not handle it correctly.<br>
<br>
</div>I was trying not to dishearten the poor guy. :-(<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> No problem putting as much info as you want in the filename, but it's<br>
> useful to also have that info in tags for sorting / displaying purposes.<br>
> The simplest solution IMHO is to follow the WMP/itunes de-facto standard<br>
> (TPE2), or the foobar2000 one<br>
> (<a href="http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Encouraged_Tag_Standards" target="_blank">http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Encouraged_Tag_Standards</a>).<br>
> foobar2000 maps Album Artist to the first defined tag in this list:<br>
> "album artist" (custom frame), "artist", "composer", "performer". For<br>
> Album Artist, it ignores TPE2 which can serve other purposes (like it's<br>
> real signification).<br>
<br>
</div>You should actually read my previous email.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
--Jeff<br>
<br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br>