Sorry, thought I was subscribed to this post but I wasn't.
QUOTE(Neksus @ Jun 16 2005, 03:12 PM)
This is a good idea! I will look into this as soon as possible!
Glad you liked it!
QUOTE(Neksus @ Jun 16 2005, 03:12 PM)
Sounds reasonable enough, but I don't use the album artist tag at all!
And if a cd contains more then one artist it is a various in my eyes!
Can you give me an example of a cd which has 3/4 of the songs by one artist and the 1/4 of various artists?
Basically, a various album to me is a compilation, with a different big name for each track. The situation where I use album artist is where a CD might have a few tracks with duets with other well-known artists, or a guest track, or something. I want the supporting artist/s included in an additional artist tag, but when I do my automatic sorting by albums I need to sort by the album artist, the person who's actually in charge of the work.
This occurs a lot in soundtracks. For instance, in the soundtrack from Flubber, there are 18 tracks. 17 are done by Danny Elfman, and the 18th track is done by KC & The Sunshine Band. Now I want KC to get their credit (for whatever that's worth), but it's really, really clear that Danny Elfman is the album artist. Just because KC did one track does not make it a various artist album.
In a lot of soundtracks (where I use album artist the most), there will be one person who did the vast majority of the work and then a notable for 1-4 tracks or so. But also I'll give an artist tag to big names who feature in something, so that I can find those tracks if I want to. For example when Ray Charles features in Billy Joel's Baby Grand. The album still belongs to Billy, but Ray is certainly an artist to note on the track. So I want to acknowledge the support of other artists either in feature roles or in a few included tracks as in soundtracks, but the album belongs to one person.
Does that make sense? It might be peculiar to the way I treat album artist, but to me the reason to use 'album artist'='artist name' intead of 'various'=1 is because the album is predominately one artist and you want to have a way to recognize which person that is. Otherwise, 'various'=1 is much more economical.