WMP11 and Album-Artist tag

General Discussion
#1

Hi all,

I've been using mp3tag for years and it has so far been working out great for me.
I just purchased a Windows Media Center PC and I'm struggeling with getting it to recognize my music correctly. I think the reason is that WMP11 uses a weird logic when building the database on how a song relates to an Album and an Artist.

I found this article on the subject
http://msmvps.com/blogs/thinice/articles/15229.aspx

I have tagged my mp3s with
Artist, Album, Title, Year, Genre and sometimes comment
I let mp3tag generate the file names using this convention
Drive:\Music\%artist%\%year% %album%\%artist% '['%album%']' $num(%track%,2) - %title%.
so that all my tracks are first in directory by Artist\Year Album\Song

It seems that WMP11 uses the tag Album and Album-Artist to build the relationship. Is there a way that I can use mp3tag to copy the Artist tag information to the Artist-Album tag for all my files?

I haven't been able to figure out how see the Album-Artist tag in mp3tag, so far I've only been able to see it in WMP11 and most of the time I do not have the right information or it's blank.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated

  • Chr
#2

as far as I can tell the field Artist in mp3tag = "Contributing Artist" in WMP11.
But WMP11 uses "Album Artist" as the main tag.

The question is now how to copy "Contributing Artist" to "Album Artist" for all my mp3 files?

#3

"Album Artist" is BAND in Mp3tag
How to mass-convert:
/t/2126/1
/t/2793/1

#4

thanks Dano!

I just found the answer on the board in thread
/t/4024/1
which is similar approach as you suggest, ie create a new Action
with properties

Action type: Format value
Field: BAND
Formatstring: %Artist%

and it works great! Saved my bacon - I wasn't looking forward to updated 10.000 tracks by hand in WMP, ugh!, that would have been a real nasty exersize.

thanks for the help!

#5

This action will work OK for many of my albums, but you might want to handle the albums that are Album Artist = "Various Artists" differently. Each individual song probably has a different artist while the album is various.

Just my "two-cents"