Re: [Easytag-mailing] Album Artist

[Arnd <ttaapp gmail com>]

Oliver <oliver joos freenet ch> [Mon, 18 Jun 2012 14:13:04 +0200]

> @Götz: I think the patch will only move the GUI textfield "Album Artist"
> visually to a more adequate position, near other more optional fields
> (fields that are only known by some but not all players).

That's correct. Personally I'm not pushing this patch to be in trunk, you 
can just apply it before compilation and be happy with the new position. 
It's not something you have to do every day. ;-)

BTW, "Composer" is very useful for organizing classical albums. On the 
other hand, who uses "Copyright", "URL" or "Encoded by"? One of these 
should have beed re-assigned as "Album Artist" IMO.

>> apple devices, iphone for instance, use album artist to display the
>> artist of an album.
>> 
>> this sets a trend. some newer mp3 players also use album artist now.
>> it's a shame i don't have the actual statistics.

All desktop applications I ever used, the SqueezeCenter I use for 
streaming, phones, the iDrive system in my parent's BMW, my navigation 
device - none of them need "Album Artist" to correctly register Various 
Artists albums or albums with multiple CDs. It is also logically clear: if 
several files in the same directory have the same "Album", but different 
"Artist" fields, it must by a VA compilation.

I guess this field was invented to have different artists while at the 
same time force one artist as owner of that album. I don't need that (I 
move additional per track artist info to the "Title" field), and the empty 
"Album Artist" field was very annoying.

In the end, the cool thing is that it's open source and we can adapt it to 
personal preferences.

Here's an idea: implement the patch as an option to the configure script. 
The patch would be simply part of the source tree, and something like "./
configure --move-aa-down" would apply the patch before compilation.