Problem with grouping with multiple album artists
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I'm having an issue with albums that have more than one album artist. In most other music players I've tried, when an album has more than one album artist, it appears in the catalog of both artists. For instance, The Cocaine Sessions by Brian Wilson and Dennis Wilson would appear both in Brian Wilson's catalog and Dennis Wilson's, which simply isn't the case with Strawberry as far as I can tell.
Is there any way I can fix this?
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First of all, when you say "album artist" are you referring strictly to the "Album Artist" tag, or the "Artist" tag? - because they are different. The "Artist" field is self-explanatory. "Album Artist" can be used to assign a single artist name to an album where the main artist performs with different people on different songs. For example, "Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday" has her singing with all kinds of different orchestras, and sometimes by herself. By assigning "Billie Holiday" to the "Album Artist" field, the album will come up under "Billie Holiday" rather than land in the "Various Artists" category. If you already know this, I apologize for over-explaining!
Now, to your question...I don't think you can get the same album to come up for two different artists. If this was the way Strawberry worked, think about a group like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The behaviour you seek would create four different groups, and if it created duplicate albums for each of the four artists, there would be a lot of redundancy in your library.
Now, what you could do, which would solve at least part of your problem, is use "Brian Wilson" as the "Album Artist" and "Brian Wilson & Dennis Wilson" as the "Artist" when editing your tags for "Cocaine Sessions". Then, if you sort your library using "Group by Album Artist...", "Cocaine Sessions" would be listed under Brian Wilson. Unfortunately, Dennis doesn't get his own sort listing (unless you duplicated the songs for him). Pretty sure you can only assign one "Album Artist" per album.
By the way, which music players sorted in the manner you described? And did they support metadata tags? Or was there some sort of master database where all the sorting took place, and just pointed to the actual songs?
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"First of all, when you say "album artist" are you referring strictly to the "Album Artist" tag, or the "Artist" tag?"
Artist tag, yeah."If this was the way Strawberry worked, think about a group like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The behaviour you seek would create four different groups, and if it created duplicate albums for each of the four artists, there would be a lot of redundancy in your library."
About CSNY, as far as I know most people consider them a group in their own right rather than just the four individuals, but that's besides the point."By the way, which music players sorted in the manner you described? And did they support metadata tags? Or was there some sort of master database where all the sorting took place, and just pointed to the actual songs?"
It was MusicBee, I simply tagged the album artist as "Brian Wilson; Dennis Wilson" (the semi-colon being the separator characters in MusicBee, some programs interpret it as "\\" or individual tags or something else entirely), and the album would appear both under Brian Wilson and Dennis Wilson. In the actual folder system it'd be organized under the "Brian Wilson; Dennis Wilson" folder but it would be grouped properly in the program itself.Anyways, if that's the case I guess I'll just begrudgingly accept it and get used to it, maybe change how I tag things to accommodate for that, we'll see! Thank you.
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@auran64 MusicBee is a great application. That was my choice when I was fooling around with Windows. Wish it was available for other platforms. It's very powerful and full-featured. I'm not surprised it had the features you describe.
But Strawberry is pretty darned good, and in some ways I enjoy its more stripped down interface, now that I've gotten used to it.
I started with iTunes on a Mac, which, in spite of all the complaints about it, I liked very much. Strawberry is focused on playlists. MusicBee and iTunes seemed to be more focused on the library.
Not exactly apples and oranges, but Strawberry, and Clementine, from which it is forked, take a different approach, and it's probably unfair to make direct comparisons.
Cheers.
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Hi,
I've registered in this forum just to look for this issue.
Starting today, I'm updating the tags of my music library to take into account multiple artists.
Before saying anything else, I'd like to add that I use the ARTIST tag and the ALBUMARTIST tag the same way: they have exactly the same content. I know they should be treatly differently, but that's the way it works for me and, in any case, it's not relevant for the purpose of discussing this issue.
Mp3tag allows you to add several ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags for the same album. The case scenario would be an album that is made by two or more composers, groups or singers in such a way that all of them are responsible for all the tracks.
I don't know how hard it is to implement a feature like this, but it makes sense to me to be able to list this album under any of the artists, as they have all worked on it.
When you look at the ARTIST tag in mp3tag, it's displayed like this:
Joaquín Sabina\Fito Páez
I don't know if this is exactly standard, but the tag was read problem-free in Musicbee, for example.
It'd be great if this feature could be implemented in Strawberry too.
Thanks in advance.
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This post is deleted! -
It wasn't displayed correctly in my previous message: the two artists are separated, in the tag, by a double backlash (not a single backlash).
