Sorting "Various Artist" albums by Album Artist

[Switch625]

Hi all,

I've searched high and low for information on this and come up with nothing, and it's driving me crazy, so I wonder if anyone knows how to help.

I want to add some Various Artists dance albums onto my G1, but when I do the Artists view in the Music app becomes a huge mess of obscure Goa trance artists with a single track each.
I have set the "Album Artist" field correctly in the tags using Tag & Rename and MusicBrainz Picard but if Android can read this field, it's ignoring it.

I considered re-tagging my MP3s to have the "Artist" field set to "Various Artists", but since I use Scrobble droid I don't want to set the tags to false values as it will mess up my last.fm library!

I know the ID3 spec is a bit vague on Album Artist, so it's possible I need to use a specific tagging program to get this to work.

Has anybody successfully got their Music app to sort by Album Artist instead of track Artist or is it just not possible without editing the source code (which I'm not above trying!)?

Thanks in advance

 

[Ramblingman]

Hi There,

I would love to know if you have managed to solve this problem... It is the first thing that I wanted to know after I started to put music on my Magic this evening...

I'm not an android developer, but I can't see any reference to 'album artist' here..
MediaStore.Audio.AudioColumns | Android Developers
I'm not sure if this means that this functionality is not available, or if I just don't know what i'm looking at!

Anyhow, i'm sure there has to be more than two people who have this problem.. so there must be a solution somewhere, right?

 

[Switch625]

No I'm afraid I haven't had any success.
Every time I get an android update on my phone I half-expect the functionality to appear but it never does.

At the moment, I have taken to browsing by Album instead of Artist. I can't even look at my artist list as I've got a load of VA albums on there and it drives me insane.

I did a fair amount on investigation and found that the area of Album Artist is a complicated one for MP3s. The tagging standard is a mess in that area. I even converted some of my MP3s to .ogg format to see if Android could work with the more stable standard but it doesn't.

To be fair, it seems to be a failing for a lot of MP3 players. My Cowon has the same flaw. It surprises me that it isn't a bigger issue to more people, but I guess it only affects fans of dance and other genres that have a lot of Various Artist albums.

Sorry I can't be more help. If I find a solution I'll post it here, but if anyone else has anything to add I'd be grateful to hear about it.