Album Artist Sort
 

Hi Maemo!

Can't wait to become an active member here, I've had my n900 for about a week and I've been loving every bit of it.

I've just had a look at both canola (which is VERY nice looking) and mediabox, neither of them have support for sorting your music by album artist (obviously the standard nokia media player doesn't have this functionality either). Both of them can sort by folder but that is really messy, and shouldn't a device like the n900 have choice? It is competing against the iTampon after all, and that's er breaching the gap between smartphones and laptops too (apparently)... anywho :p

Two questions; if I've missed it, what is the workaround for this sorting dilemma? If there isn't one, is there a way to influence the way the standard music player looks at an id3 tag? Like a file I can edit or something?

I'd love to get this working, if I was more technically adept i'd be writing a plug-in or something but I haven't had to time pick up a programming language since I've been interested in doing so :(

love this community,

thank you! :)

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

If you use the standard media player, you can tap on the title bar and select "Artist". This groups & sorts by artist - is this what you're after?

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Artist and album artist are not the same thing. Guest vocals etc. This is particularly annoying with hip hop. Album artist is how we organize music in real life.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Lol the device does not even seem to recognise Artist for me. Just shows Album Artist. So I am left with just Various Artist for compilation albums. I would be grateful if it could just get the Artist right and then I would worry about sorting by album artist.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

@etuoyo can you double-check the tags on your mp3 files? Various Artists could accidentally be in the artist tag for example.

I spent days tagging/album-arting my 70gb music collection to perfection (thanks to songbird & mp3tag) and to find the n900 having literally no support for Album Artist tags in the metadata made a little part inside of me shrivel and die.

Sorry to whine guys I'd just love some kind of feature that let me sort my music by album artist. Having a separate artist for each track off a compilation instead of one big "various artists" tag is a little annoying when rifling through 4000 tracks :/

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

90% of music players, taggers, etc. I've used don't support this "Album artist" tag - it's not one of the basic standard tags. You might as well ask why they don't support the "Composer" tag.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

I think it actually is recognizing the artist tags, but because there is more than one artist tag on the tracks from the album it shows it as Various Artists. E.g. Album with track 1 artist "X" and track 2 artist "X feat Y" gets shown as various artists.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

I just noticed that, I'm not sure what's going on with it. It obviously has some kind of system for sorting them by album artist or not.

Rob1n, if you've ever attempted to organize your music collection sensibly, it's near impossible without an album artist tag.

I'll check out the situation with the tags on my device in a bit and I'll get back to here.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

I organise them in directories, so have a separate set for Various artist albums. I don't expect every music player to support an "Album artist" tag though. If you're a classical music enthusiast, no doubt you'd insist that you can't organise your music without "Composer" and "Conductor" tags.

Personally, I prefer things as they are in the N900 - if I browse by artist then I want to see all artists, that's the whole point of browsing by artist.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

So you'd want to see the 16 individual artists from a compilation album rather than just 'groove armada' or something? seriously?

Anywho, I've been poking around and I've got more of an idea about how the media player app looks at tags. Removing the itunes bullcrap from the tag and adding an "ALBUMARTIST" tag to it as well as a "BAND" tag seemed to work. (this is in mp3tag btw) I've reduced 3 compilations into their respective album artists now (woo!) so I'm super happy.

I'm 100% sure it's nothing to do with directories. I'd like to get more people in on this so we can figure out exactly what it is.

In my experience, mp3tag is the best software out there for getting nitty gritty with mp3 metadata. :)

cheers

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Yes - otherwise I'd browse by album.

I'd like to have an option to browse by filesystem though.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

I take it you don't have many albums?

It's ok it looks like you need to have the specific "ALBUMARTIST" tag in the file, if it has the "BAND" tag which is what mp3tag uses, it won't work.

I wish there was some info about this somewhere, problem solved though.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

In my N900 the media player also just displays Album Artist and not the Artist tag. Like etuoyo said, sorting by Artist will actually sort by Album Artist and I get Various Artists with hundreds of songs. In fact, within the media player I know of no way to see the Artist tag of a song - the Now Playing pane also shows things like Various Artists. Interestingly enough, the widget sometimes does displays the correct Artist tag...

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

i've been having similar experiences, ill try and determne what makes the n900 show the artist tag or not, when i get home. its probably something to do with the tag version, itunes junk or the artist tag which is used.

most of the time it sorts by album artist and displays the artist though. hmmm.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

I've just filed a bug about the incorrect display of AlbumArtist in the now playing screen:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8817

Generally, if your files are correctly tagged with AlbumArtist (i find Musicbrainz picard to be the best way of doing this), maemo handles them pretty well. There's just the problem with the now playing screen, and it would also be nice if there was an option to browse by both "album artist" and "artist" seperately, instead of the current way which only allows "album artist".

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

And here's a bug report for adding seperate Artist/AlbumArtist views:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8818



(and one more while I'm at it, for adding a date grouping view to the media player as well:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8819 )

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Is "partially typing the artists' name", so you can find "exactly" who want, not a viable solution?

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

If you are in album view, any songs with the same <Album Title> but with even one song with a different artist will show the artist as "Various Artists".

If you are in artist view, the artist of each song, whether they are on different albums, will show up. Once you select an artist, you'll get thumbnails of the album covers that the songs appear on.

The only problem I have is with songs that have one artist featuring multiple artists. These appear as separate distinct artists. The phone/tag/computer cannot understand that there are more artists. This is a limitation with tags I feel. I'd like something like Artist and then Featured Artist 1, 2, 3, etc and then show up in the "Play" screen as <Song> by <Artist> featuring <Featured Artist 1>, <Featured Artist 2> & <Featured Artist 3>.

A lot of the information on the tag recognition has been discussed quite a lot quite recently.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Yes this works but can be temperamental. Sometimes you type the artist name before the listing comes up and nothing shows. If you delete what you typed and see the list there and partially type in the name again, often-times it shows up. Or just wait for the whle list to display and start typing.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Thanks for filing all those bugs man! :)

Glad to see I'm not the only one who this effects. @zombiepig it only picks up on an albumartist tag if it is the "ALBUMARTIST" tag not a "BAND" tag. Some players/taggers (mp3tag is the only one I'm sure about this of) will say they're tagging Album Artist but their using the "BAND" tag not the "ALBUMARTIST" tag, so you have to be pretty careful :/

OK just figured it out. the songs that the n900 is putting under "various artists" by itself DONT have ALBUMARTIST tags, if you want to see the individual artist in Now Playing you need to tag that album with an ALBUMARTIST tag with Various Artists in it! :)

EDIT: The easiest way to do that is batch select your various artists folder with mp3tag, right click go into extended tags then add the ALBUMARTIST value and set it to Various Artists.

Very glad I figured this out. :p

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

hang on, are you saying if you tag your files with albumartist "various artists", then media player does correctly show just the "artist" tag on the now playing screen? cos that definitely doesn't happen for me!

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Yeah, me neither.

nathanielsametz, which tag editor do you use to see the correct Band and Album Artist tags? I've been using mp3tag for a good while now and was convinced everything was fine in that front - the mp3s were always sorted correctly in my old iPod Touch.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Yeah guys the media player is being picky, that or the players we have been using use the same tag that mp3tag does, "BAND" which the n900 clearly doesn't recognize.

Like I said before, just because iTunes or mp3tag is showing the Album Artist area with information doesn't mean it is using the "ALBUMARTIST" tag, it's most likely to be using the "BAND" tag.

I've solved all my Various Artist problems now with mp3tag. Here's how:

1. In mp3tag, get the files up that you want to edit,
2. right click on them and select extended tags
3. click the "add-field" button
4. Field: ALBUMARTIST
Value: Various Artists (or whatever)

5. (optional) While you're in there, clean out any extraneous tags like ITUNNORM and the itunes compilations tag etc. Only remove itunes tags if you are no longer using iTunes as your music library/player thing. (like me, woohoo! Free!)

I haven't taken out the BAND tag because I have no doubt some other players/taggers wont recognize ALBUMARTIST.

I fixed the issue of Various Artists showing as the artist in Now Playing by doing exactly what I've just described up there.

Hope that helps,

nathaniel :)

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

The tags are basicaly additional information added before the start or after the end of the sound stream. With mp3tag, you can add custom tags, meaning tags wich have whatever name you want, and what ever value you want. However, mp3tag doesn't suppor aac id3v2 tags for a reason not even the creater of the programs is aware. When i asked him why not support such a feature, he said that this is just not happening. And i don't understant way, there are tagger out there that support this.

Anyway. For a program to recognize ALL the tags a sound file might have, he has to have a way to "scan" the begining and the end, for tag info. If it finds it, then it needs to sort out TAG NAME (which could be anything youre heart desires such as band composer, writer creator, beats per second, album artist, albumartist, etc) and then determine it's value.

This whole thing is messed up since there are a lot of different formats and version of tagging files.

Something universal has to be created, that work on each and every music file, in the same way (adding tag info at the beggining or at the end) and then every music player should have the ability to detect ALL tags and their values from a given sound file.

Since the adding of the tags is at the begiing or at the end, every sound file regardless of format should work with this universal tagging solution.
Just download mp3 tag and add your music files there. Then right click music file and hit extended tags.
A quick look on one of my downloaded mp3, reveals tags like ALBUM ARTIST COMMENT ENCODEDBY LANGUAGE TITLE TRACK WWW YEAR
As you can see there are a lot of extra tags that are just plain and simple useless.
It is the merit of the mp3tag to "see" these extended tags and their values, to bad it doesn't work for aac id3v2, the format i use for my music in N900
The thing is if we had via a program the ability to see modify and add whatever tags and values we like to whatever music file we have, and also players able to see all these tags, Nobody would stop you from adding custom tags like COMMENT to all your files and acctualy add a usefull comment to the file. And since you can see all the tags of a file on that hipotheticaly device that sees all tags, this wouldn't have been a useless thing to do.

Also, apart from this custom tags with custom fields, a LYRICS tags could be created, and the value it holds, could be in information structured in verses this way:
1)Time Information for instance 0.0-34.234
2)No words No lyrics, some sort of distinct sign
3)Time information 34.234-38.354
4)Verse 1
etc etc
The first time information means that that period of time from the start (0.0) until the 34second and 234ms is reached, there is no voice, and from the 34s234ms to 38.354 a voice is heard, and you have the following lyrics.

This way an "educated" lyrics reader could not only see the lyrics, but it can even display them as the song plays for maximum efectivity

If i's knew how to do this, i'd do this myself, but it takes lots of power and acceptance to create a standard.

And since no money is made out of this, i think we will never see things like this and we will always have trouble with tags and sound formats.
Especialy if someone else, decides to implement "their own" tag methods, such as apple for instance, wich would have the interest that the music they sell from their store to work only on their devices.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Bytales I know exactly how you feel. Luckily I solved this issue but it's not this easy for a lot of other issues.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

My files are definitely tagged properly by a combination of mp3tag, itunes and mediamonkey but the N900 just doesn't want to know. It is painful cause I spent like a month tagging my 4000 plus songs, downloading album art from amazon (and in many cases I was missing the album so had to search the web for album name first) and embedding the album art. So for the device to be unable to show my tags and album art is really annoying.

Will possibly do some testing later (I have found it so annoying I don't even use the media player anymore and considering buying an mp3 player even though I sold my ipod touch when I was getting the N900) but I think:

1. When I synch with Winamp the device shows both album artist and song artiist. Not ideal because on now playing I get something like "Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson ft Janet Jackon". However, much better than what I normally get which is "Michael Jackson" then I have to figure out/guess who the featured artist is or in the case of compilation albums guess everything since it just shows Various Artists.

Problem with Winamp is I can't get it to synch anywhere but the main folder which then makes file manager unusable but that's what I use for browsing videos and pictures (due to inability to create video categories so sort that out in folders and because the picture app opens up in all images mode so takes ages to start).

2. If the song has idv2 tags I think the device shows song artist properly but not if it has just idv2 tags. Winamp can copy from v3 to v2 but only one song at a time. Have not found any programme that does batch copying.

Will do more testing but as I said I have all but given up on using the N900 as a media player.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Okay did some testing. Doesn't seem to matter whether I sync with Media Monkey, Windows Media Player, Winamp or by drag and drop. In all instances just get the same problem of the media player showing album artist rather than song artist.

Found a song by an artist which featured another artist which showed song artist (so correct info). Compared it with another song by the same artist which featured an artist but which was showing album artist. Could not see any difference whatsover. Both had ID3v2 and ID3v1. Both had info in both song artist and album artist section. So no difference between them whatsoever. Yet the N900 treated them differently.

My conclusion is that the N900 (or at least mine) just shows song artist for a few random songs but shows album artist for most. So the media player aspect of the device is very rubbish as far as I am concerned. In addition to not having proper tagging getting any external playlists to work is a real mission.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Ok FRAK I thought I had this sorted but the Various Arist albums have gone back to displaying Various Artists instead of the individual artists.

Just messed around a bit, I changed the BAND tag to individual artists and the n900 picked it up! So it obviously sees the BAND tag... I'd really like this cleared up. Wtf is going on?

:(

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

All my stuff gets tagged with Tag&Rename (purchased way back in 2002!). I keep a portable version on the phones storage. Works in Windows and in WINE.

No issues at all.

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

Any compilation albums cools?

Re: Album Artist sort in any Media app?
 

I have been trying to tackle this problem too. Something I found out was that a soundtrack album I have that is WMA encoded, displays the tags properly. It shows title, artist, album artist ("Soundtrack"), and album (movie name). In the widget it displays title, artist, and album artist.

An mp3 file with the same properties (per mp3tag) doesn't display artist at all. Just album artist.