Re: [Easytag-mailing] Album Artist

[Oliver <oliver joos freenet ch>]

Am Montag, den 18.06.2012, 14:19 +0200 schrieb Götz Waschk: 
> yes, you are trying to move it, but I think it belongs logically to
> the position it has now.  It is one of the fields you might want so
> sort by, like album name and track number.
> 
> The attached screen-shot from Banshee 2.4.1 shows how the field is
> used by a player.

Thanks, I checked Banshee myself now. There the "optional" nature of
"Album Artist" is solved by adding a checkbox widget to deactivate it.
Could be a solution for Easytag too. But anyway, to me it seems logical
to move it near to other fields that are empty for most tracks (or even
all tracks for a lot of users like me and Arnd)
Why did you mention a "sort by" feature? This sounds reasonable, but has
nothing to do with the position of the textfield or column, has it?

Googling for "Album Artist" I found that ITunes, Banshee and XBMC are
players that know this tag. XBMC has an interesting strategy to guess
the album artist if the tag is missing or empty.
Audacious, Totem, Clementine, XMMS, GMPC, Exaile and Rythmbox do not
seem to support it, and are popular players too (Ubuntu just moved from
Banshee to Rhytmbox this year). In Amarok the tag caused some confusion
because it is used to group albums but is not shown or editable, see:
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=88454

In summary I found that "Album Artist" is ignored by many software
players, is only mentioned as "Unofficial Frames Seen in the Wild" on
http://id3.org  and (most important!) only makes sense for music albums
with various artists, but is useless (= empty) for all other music
albums, single tracks, audio books ect.

So adding "Album Artist" to EasyTag, but at a less prominent position
seems an optimal compromise to me. The current position is annoying,
especially for novices who have players that do not support it! They are
tempted to fill the field somehow and then get confused/frustrated.

with regards,
+++ Oliver