I notice in the metadata of my mp3s that it has track artist and album artist. So for an entire album, the album artist will be the same and for the track artist it will either be the same as the album artist, or some of them may by different (like the main artist then a featuring someone else). The problem is when in any music player I have tried, if any of the songs have a different track artist, it will list them all separately. So if you show the artist list, it maybe list that artist multiple times because of the track artist may have someone else listed. i know I could go by album display list and it will show the whole album, but sometimes I don't always remember the album name. Is there anyway around this other than making the track artist and album artist the same?
For a various artists album compilation, I would use "Various Artists" in the album artist box. For example, one compilation I have on my phone is a Motown collection. Without the album artist entered, it becomes chaos. The 'various' tag (or I could call it Motown) solves that. The 'artist' box is whoever did the song. There are occasional glitches, but I think media players read what they want.
I am not necessarily talking about various artists. For example, on a particular 2Pac CD, the metadata has "All Eyez on Me" for the album and every song on there has 2Pac as the "Album artist". Some songs may have something different under the "artist" field such as 2Pac feat. Snoop Dogg or 2Pac feat. Nate Dogg, etc. So the problem is on every music player app I have tried on my phone, if you go to the artist list, it is display everything in the artist field rather than the album artist field (it will not only show 2Pac, but will also show all the other names under the "artist" field such as 2Pac feat. Snoop Dog, 2Pac feat. Nate Dogg, etc.) This becomes very cluttered and if you were to just select the 2Pac artist, it would not show all the other songs. To get around this, do I need to edit the metadata so the artist field only says 2Pac (and get rid of all the feat. other artists?).
Yes you do need to edit the meta data. Not sure why its set that way on yours, but my meta data is written so that the featured artist is on the title. For example Title: Out of Goodbyes (ft Lady Antebellum) Artist: Maroon 5 Album Artist: Maroon 5
Its that way on mine because when I ripped all the CD's, some of them were like that so I just made them all like that and took the feat. artists out of the title and put then in the track artist slot. It works the way it is supposed to on the computer but after doing a search on this, it sounds like it only doesn't sort them by album artist in Android. I guess for a compilation album, putting the individual artist name under the track artist would be good because it would sort them that way. Thanks for clarifying this.
