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...
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.
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".
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.
Is "partially typing the artists' name", so you can find "exactly" who want, not a viable solution?
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.
I've just filed a bug about the incorrect display of AlbumArtist in the now playing screen:
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.
