%band% vs. %album artist%

General Discussion
1

Hello!
This is my first post at this forum.

Going straight to matter - I'm a user of foobar2000 player. And as far as I am concerned the prefered tag for indicating an album artist is %album artist%. However I use mp3tag for a long time and hundreds of albums are tagged using %band% tag. What is the difference between those tags? Which one is better? Please give me some info!

Regards
pmj

2

Hi,

Basically;
%band% = MP3
%album artist% = FLAC, etc.

mp3tag can seamlessly handle this if using different formats, there is a thread about it, but should be in the documentation.

Daz

3

Can you give more feedback please?

4

Hi,

Please read this.

Daz

5

Thanks a lot!

But how about foobar2000? I heard it prefers tag ALBUM ARTIST. Don't know why...
So how about adding both? Does it make sense?

Edit: I'm considering to move along to ALBUM ARTIST with my MP3s - Winamp also supports it.

6

BUMP!!!

From what I've noticed (compatibility):

Winamp:

(in order)

  1. BAND
  2. ALBUM ARTIST

foobar2000:

ALBUM ARTIST - full compatibility
BAND, ALBUMARTIST - partial compatibility (if you configure it accordingly to them)

iTunes:

BAND

WMP:

Doesn't support any of them (LOL)

So... As far as I am aware ALBUMARTIST is a complete garbage. ALBUM ARTIST and BAND are both useful.

What is your opinion on that matter? Are there any other utilities/mobile devices to be concerned?
What I also would like to know is a technical issue of that matter:
BAND writes to TPE2 ID3v2 field, right? How about the rest?

And supposing I'll decide to keep more than one tag field. Is there any method to make Mp3tag write them at once? (not using action to copy one field's content to another)

7

WMP also uses BAND (TPE2) on mp3. But foobar writes by default ID3v2.4 tags which WMP will not read at all.

When you add %album artist% in foobar2000 it writes a TXXX frame with the description "Album artist"

BAND (TPE2) is the most popular.

ALBUMARTIST is mainly used on flac.

8

@dano

Thanks for the information!

9

All my FLAC files have the album artist tagged as "ALBUMARTIST" is there a way to batch convert these to "ALBUM ARTIST" for foobar2000?

I did have a quick read around but I couldn't find a definite answer.

Thanks.

10

create an action. Select "format value". Field is ALBUM ARTIST and format string is %albumartist%

This will copy all the values currently in ALBUMARTIST into a new tag caled ALBUM ARTIST.

11

Works a treat. Thank you and happy new year. :slight_smile:

12

Back to the main subject:

Is there a way to write value to several fields at once? (not using Action to copy one field's content to another)

13

I'm not sure what it has to do with the original subject, but AFAIK, you cannot. Explain what you're trying to do and perhaps someone can offer a solution.

14

I want to add information to TPE2 and TXXX ("Album Artist") at once (using one field)

15

No, that's not possible. Your first instincts were correct. Do whatever you need to write the data into one of the fields and then simply copy the value to the other. If you place all actions in the same action group then it's no more work for you in actual use.

16

Thanks for the info!