Hi,

I'm looking for a standard method of tagging my MP3s, specifically a way that allows one to differentiate Various Artists tracks/albums. I've read the HA wiki and it talks about Album Artist, but it looks like this is specifically a foobar2000 'standard'? Sadly foobar2000 is far from a standard - it's not even platform independent or open source.

Are there any truely standard ways of Album Artist style tagging? How do non-foobar2000 users tag their music?


Thanks,
Aragon

The non-foobar way of doing it is via the BAND tag (WMP, Rockbox and others use this). From what I know about the Foobar way of doing it is that the Album Artist tag is actually a custom frame(TXXX), whereas the BAND tag is in the ID3 spec (TPE2).

Personally, I use Band.

Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, MusicMatch and Media Center alle use BAND (TPE2) as Album Artist field. MediaMonkey also, I believe. foobar2000 is the only program that uses its own custom tag.

Have a look at MusicBrainz. It's as open as you get and pretty much a de facto standard for tagging.

Thanks everyone. I will use TPE2. Looks like this is a common question.