This has been driving me nuts for a while now. I'm trying to get my music library working well with MCE 2005, but I've learned that I need to have the Album Artist tag set for all albums.

Basically up to this point I've been using foobar with strictly ID3V1 + APEV2 tagging (and following the rule that ALBUM ARTIST tag only gets set for Various Artist albums).

Can someone explain how the ALBUM ARTIST tag works in WMP/MCE? Some have said that its equivalent to the BAND tag, but I can't find either explicitly mentioned in tagging programs.

I downloaded The GodFather and found the options 'Auto update BAND from ARTIST' and 'Auto update ALBUM ARTIST from ARTIST' which sounds like what I want, but with the options checked and retagging/syncing ID3V1->ID3V2 tags WMP/MCE still doesn't pick the ALBUM ARTIST field up, and I can't work out how to check if its set from within TGF.

What's the smallest change I can quickly make to my entire library to get this tag set, and hopefully not mess up foobar playback? All the other existing tags are recognised fine by WMP/MCE.

All advice appreciated...

MCE Album Art Fixer will not only fix that specific issue for you, it will also help you get album art for each of your albums (makes browsing in MCE so much nicer!)

* I have no affiliation with the person who made this app - I just used it to solve the exact same issue - that's all.

"Album Artist" for MP3 content uses TPE2 (aka Band) in ID3v2.3 -- you can see/edit this within WMP 10, too. Add the Album Artist column to the libarary view if it's not there. (You can even use the "Find Album Info" metadata search feature, if so inclined... which will populate Album Artist -- and find Art.) If your content is sorted and organized cleanly in WMP 10, the MCE interface should behave similarly.

Here is a cheaper/faster/cleaner option. Use this vbs I wrote (patterned off something similar, but not general in another forum) that will just modify the MediaPlayer database w/o having to "fix" your MP3s. Create a file called mce_album_artis.vbs, save and then execute


Set objPlayer = CreateObject("WMPlayer.OCX" )
Set objMediaCollection = objPlayer.MediaCollection
Set colSongList = objMediaCollection.getByAttribute("MediaType", "Audio")

For i = 0 to colSongList.Count - 1
Set objSong = colSongList.Item(i)
strAlbumArtist = objSong.GetItemInfo("WM/AlbumArtist")
strArtist = objSong.GetItemInfo("Author")

If Len(strAlbumArtist) = 0 then
objSong.SetItemInfo "WM/AlbumArtist", strArtist
End If
Next