Various Artists GSoC project

[Michael Pujos]

Jeff Mitchell a écrit :
> Album: Crazy Techno vol 2
> Album Artist: Ministry of Sound
> Artist: TechnoDude
> Track Title: Blowing Your Mind
> Featuring: John Blaze
>
> This isn't a far-fetched example by any means -- in fact, it's quite
> common -- but clearly "John Blaze" belongs in TPE2, not "Ministry of
> Sound".  So where do you put "John Blaze" if you've filled TPE2 with
> "Ministry of Sound"?  Will anyone show it if you put it in TCOM or TOPE?
>
> There is only one purely cross-player solution to the Album Artist
> problem in ID3, which is, don't do it. 
In you example above, i'd put John Blaze in a custom tag (TXXX frame) 
since there's no standard frame for the "Featuring" credit.

>  ID3 sucks, but the right way to
> fix it is to form an industry group to hammer out a newer version that
> fixes these problems.  
This won"t happen ever: ID3V2 2.4 is a 9 year old standard and most 
software / hardware players do not handle it correctly.

> Personally, I put the information in the title, and use the Artist tag
> for the artist advertised on the album.  This has the added benefit of
> making it easy to find all tracks on an album and having that album
> sorted and collated properly in the Collection Browser, without having
> to have an artist view show a bunch of artists with one single track:
>
> Album: Crazy Techno vol 2
> Artist: Ministry of Sound
> Track Title: Blowing Your Mind [TechnoCode f. John Blaze]
>
> Doing it this way ensures that no matter where I take my files, I'll
> always get all the information from the track, without having to worry
> about non-conforming players.  It's both standards-compliant* _and_ easy
> to use and organize.
>
>
>   
> *You may argue that it's not standards compliant because it's putting
> more information than the exact title of the track into the title frame.
>  As most compilation/various artists CDs list the artist of the track
> along with the title (for instance, on the back of the CD), I don't have
> a problem considering all of that grouped information to be a part of
> the title.
>   

No problem putting as much info as you want in the filename, but it's 
useful to also have that info in tags for sorting / displaying purposes.
The simplest solution IMHO is to follow the WMP/itunes de-facto standard 
(TPE2), or the foobar2000 one 
(http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Encouraged_Tag_Standards).
foobar2000 maps Album Artist to the first  defined tag in this list: 
"album artist" (custom frame), "artist", "composer", "performer". For 
Album Artist, it ignores TPE2 which can serve other purposes (like it's 
real signification).