I am just about finished tagging my CD’s I ripped and I was wondering what is the difference between the “artist” tag and the “album artists” tag.
While I understand you can apply your own meaning to any tag, I was tryng to figure out what others use them for? Is it for compliations of different artists or somethig?
Soundtracks and compilations for the most part.
So for the song Bang Bang, I’ll put Kill Bill V1 OST as the album artist and Nancy Sinatra as the artist.
iTunes can be set to automatically find album art. If you are trying to find a compilation album, it won’t be listed under the artist performing the song. In that case, you can set the artist to whomever, and the Album Artist to “Various Artists,” and the art can be found in the database, if it exists.
If an album is “by” one person, but a particular track is a duet with a guest, then the Album Artist is the main artist, but the Artist gets both singers.
I am so glad they added Album Artist. I’ve recently had to re-rip my CD collection and it has made things easier. The music is organized into folders by Artist, with Album subfolders. Before, if there were guest artists on an album, a folder would be created for them, a subfolder named for the album, and then the single track that they appeared on. The tracks for an album would get scattered around among these artist folders, and when I would view by artist in the player software, there would be all these contributing artists I had never heard of or cared about. It was especially bad for albums with various artists.
Now folders are created by Album Artist, so if a No Doubt track has Bounty Killa in it, it stays in the No Doubt folder.
iTunes finding album art? HA!
If you have a large library and don’t want to set all your album artists by hand, you can use this script to automate the process.