Hey guys,
I have a pretty straightforward question: I want to create an Action that automatically replaces all the empty Album Artist fields with the Album Artist Various Artists as I've been doing this manually quite often when adding new music to my music library.
I've already tried a bunch of different things like adding a Replace Action that has the the Original Album Artist field set to < empty >, "" or " " but none of them seem to work so far, so I would greatly appreciate if someone could help me out here.
Thanks in advance!
One solution without need to write an Action:
I would load all tracks in Mp3tag.
Then sort by the column ALBUMARTIST.
Then select all the entries with empty ALBUMARTIST.
Then enter "Various Artists" in the left Tag Panel field ALBUMARTIST.
Save the change.
Done.
Please let us know if you really need an Action for this task.
As there are no empty fields - fields without data simply don't exist - you have to create a new field of the required type and contents.
Create an action of the type "Format value" for ALBUMARTIST
Format string: Various Artists
Ah gotcha, but I'm guessing this replaces ALL album artists fields with Various Artists even if they are NOT empty to begin with?
Yeah this is what I've been doing so far actually, either in mp3tag or just in iTunes with all the tracks selected, so having an Action to automate this process would save me a lot of time.
Indeed. I am no friend of blindly allegedly automatic manipulations of data.
Still, you may modify the
Format string: $if2(%albumartist%,Various Artists)
to leave existing values as they are.
From the documentation about boolean functions:
means
"If the field ALBUMARTIST is not empty, then use the current content of ALBUMARTIST. Otherwise use the fixed string Various Artists"
So then if I combine that with your original Format value, it would only change the album artist fields of the tracks that are empty, right? Cause that's exactly what I need.
No, you use the second suggestion instead of the first.
More on the contents side:
"Various Artists" is usually the dummy name for the album artist in compilations. This would also imply that the data in ALBUM ist the same for at least 2 files.
IMHO, it could just as well be that a track is a single and the ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST should be the same.
So a non-existant ALBUMARTIST does not necessarily mean that it should be "Various Artists".
That did the trick!! Thanks so much for your help, LyricsLover 
Ah I misunderstood, but got it anyway! Thanks for your help, ohrenkino! 
And which suggestion was your favoured solution?
Please tick the corresponding post.
Done!
And yeah, I mainly use VA as the Album Artist for either existing EDM compilations with several different producers, or for grouping a large number of singles together in a compilation of my own so I don’t end up with a billion albums with just 1 single in my iTunes library.
But in both cases I always use VA as the album artist so it’s really nice I can automate it now!