What's the Difference Between ARTIST & ALBUM ARTIST ?

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studogvetmed

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The album artist is designated to attempt to keep all songs in an album together when there is more than one artist on an album.

For example on a soundtrack where every artist is different you might decided to call the album artist "Various artists"

In the case of a album with guests artists where each song is a duet and you might name each artist Johnny Cash & <blank>, Johny Cash & <blank2> etc, you might call the album artist just "johnny cash"

What would be nice is if one time down the line if you could name an album artist and browsing to that artist on the iPod would show all songs under that album artist, so you could find the song by browsing to johnny cash instead of having to go to Johnny Cash & <blank> Which neither iTunes or the iPod currently does...

It's basically an extra line of sorting and organization iTunes uses.
 

Deaf Raiders

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I put my Now CDs as 'Various Artist' on "Album Artist". If James Blunt Album i use his name on both Artist and Album Artist.
 

Essin

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I always bring up Santanas "Supernatural" as an example.
Every other song is "Santana featuring Someone"

So Album is "Supernatural" of course
Artist will be "Santana feat. Everlast", "Santana feat. Eagle-Eye Cherry" and "Santana feat. Rob Thomas" etc etc
But "Album Artist" will be "Santana" for all tracks of the album, keeping the sorting straight.

Ta-dah!!!
 

Germansuplex

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An alternative to that (for the newer users trying to figure out the best way to tag their music) would be to set both the artist and album artist field to "Santana" and name the track "Smooth feat. Rob Thomas". I do this so that I can cut back on the number of artists in my list, since I already have enough.
 

~*McoreD*~

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Germansuplex said:
An alternative to that (for the newer users trying to figure out the best way to tag their music) would be to set both the artist and album artist field to "Santana" and name the track "Smooth feat. Rob Thomas". I do this so that I can cut back on the number of artists in my list, since I already have enough.
While that will reduce the number of Artists in the iTunes browser, I really discourage this method. Hopefully iTunes browser will actually have ALBUMARTIST and not Artist in the future.
 

Germansuplex

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Why do you discourage it? Any particular reason? I will still use this method regardless of what features are added to browse.

I'm not saying that it's the best method, but it's an alternative. No way of tagging is perfect for everyone, but I think this is a fairly common and acceptable method.
 
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~*McoreD*~

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Yes, that's right. :)

It was only for strictly-speaking:

track.Name is the Name of the track
track.Artist is the Artist who performs in the track
track.AlbumArtist is the Artist who represent the Album

Just purely following the standards only.
 
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