Re: [Banshee-List] Handling various artist albums

["Alan McGovern" <alan mcgovern gmail com>]

I understand that albumartist is meant to be used to bring an album
together, but I don't understand why it is needed and what you'd put
in it that would be useful.

Suppose there's a guy called 'Now Dance 2008' who takes the top 20 dance songs from 2008 and creates a compilation CD of them. This means when you rip the album and add it to your library, you'll end up with 20 'artists' in your playlist each of which contains 1 track. Nowhere will you see 'Now Dance 2008'.

Now in steps in the AlbumArtist tag. What you do is set AlbumArtist = 'Now Dance 2008', then you set each individual 'Artist' tag according to the artist who created that particular song. Once you've done this, all supporting media libraries will say "Hey, this has an AlbumArtist tag" and will group songs by 'AlbumArtist / Album' rather than 'Artist / Album'. Your library will then display the album under an 'Artist' called 'Now Dance 2008'. This will contain those 20 tracks.

Suppose one of the tracks is Moby - Porcelain. It will show up in the artist 'Now Dance 2008', but it won't show up under the artist 'Moby'.

I hope that makes sense (and more importantly i got it right).

Alan.