More on Album Artist and Band with FLAC and dbpa

General Discussion
1

This is probably clear to most folks, but I struggled a bit this morning with my first ripping since mp3tag changed how it deals with band/albumartist/album artist. I thought I could no longer use "Album Artist" (with the space). But evidently I was wrong. I rip to FLAC with dbpa.

  1. When mapping ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST in the vorbis comments options of dbpa, mp3tag does NOT see the album artist (whether looking at %band%, %albumartist%, or %album artist%). However, when I use dbpa to convert the FLAC file to mp3, mp3tag does see ALBUMARTIST in the mp3 file.

  2. I changed the dbpa mapping of vorbis tags for FLAC to leave ALBUM ARTIST as ALBUM ARTIST. Now, in mp3tag, the FLAC file shows up with ALBUM ARTIST (%album artist%) and a mp3 file created by dbpa from the FLAC file shows ALBUMARTIST (%albumartist%). This is all fine, because SqueezeboxServer sees both the FLAC file and mp3 file properly with both album artist and track artist correctly. And the mp3 version also shows ARTIST and ALBUM ARTIST correctly in itunes. Foobar sees some version of either band or album artist depending on whether the file is mp3tag or FLAC (see custom column info below). So this is good too. All my bases are covered.

    [$if($strcmp(%codec%,MP3),%band%,%album artist%)]

2

Maybe you're thinking about it a little backwards (or a little too much :slight_smile: ). It should be much simpler than that.

In Mp3tag you can map 'ALBUMARTIST' (target) to 'ALBUM ARTIST' (source) for VorbisComments. Then in Mp3tag you'd always use 'ALBUMARTIST' and it will read and write 'ALBUM ARTIST' in FLAC files, and TPE2 frames in MP3 files. Should be all that's necessary.

3

BTW, I just noticed that it seems to be necessary to close Mp3tag and reopen it when remapping VorbisComment fields before you see the correct representation in the Extended Tags dialog. I'm not sure if that's new behavior, or if it's a bug, but I imagine it can be confusing.

4

good point. I've redone my mapping as you suggest....