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Topic: Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ? (Read 4040 times) previous topic - next topic
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Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Hi to all,

I have encoded some hundreds of CD's with EAC into mpc- files with the following settings:
1)  <--quality 6 --xlevel --artist "%a" --title "%t" --album "%g" --year "%y" --track "%n" --genre "%m" %s>

2) only ape- tags, no ID3- tags

3) For Various Artist's CD's I used the Various Artist feature of EAC

When I display the files in foobar2000 0.7, (I use the formatting- cheme Hybrid by upNoth) everything is displayed well, except my Various Artist's CD's!! The Various Artists titles are scatterd all over and not combined and displayed as all the other non Various Artist's albums.

Please, can somebody help me, so that my Varios Artist's CD's are combined and displayed as one CD and not scattered all over??


antares

Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Reply #1 –
Simply set the ALBUM ARTIST field to various artists via masstagger.

~ Florian

Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Reply #2 –
I think it would better to leave the individual artists as they are, and add a new field 'Various', and type 'yes' into its command field for all the various artists files you have. This then can be custom sorted, probably by using this code:

Code: [Select]
%ALBUM% - $num(%TRACKNUMBER%,3)

Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Reply #3 –
Quote
I think it would better to leave the individual artists as they are, and add a new field 'Various', and type 'yes' into its command field for all the various artists files you have.

Ganymed's onto the best way. I've mucked about trying a lot of different methods, but the "ALBUM ARTIST" field is the best way to do things. You're not altering the "ARTIST" fields, just adding another one. That way, for cases like mixed CDs that actually have an an actual album artist, not a "Various Artists", your formatting string can deal with that easily and efficiently.

It's the best way to do things. Honestly.

Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Reply #4 –
With the hybrid formatting you have these options:

With tags:
1) Do as sld says and add a VARIOUS tag with a value like "yes" or anything else.
If you do this the album will show up with "Various Artists" in the album info part and show the name of the artist for each track (before the title).

2) Do as ganymed and Canar says if the album is for example a DJ compilation. If the album is compiled by DJ Tiesto you add a ALBUM ARTIST tag with the value "DJ Tiesto". Then the album will show up with "DJ Tiesto" in the album info part and show the name of the artist for each track (before the title).

3) The last option is to add a PERFORMER tag. The contents of this tag will be shown as the artist for each track while it wil say "Various Artists" in the album info part. So, if you give this the same value as the ARTIST tag, you will essentially get the same result as adding a VARIOUS tag. Remember that the contents of this tag will be shown, and the it has higher priority than the VARIOUS tag.

Without tags, but by directory name:
If you start the directoryname with 'VA - ' (without quotes) the album will be treated as if a VARIOUS is present. It will look for this in the two closest directories (in case of multiple discs albums).


I'm not sure if this explanation was clear enough? If not, just ask. 

Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Reply #5 –
...thank you very much to all of you for your replies!!! I will try out your proposals and if there will be some questions left, I will post again in this thread.

It always gives me a good feeling to post in this forum, because everybody is very helpful!!


Thanks a lot!!


antares

Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Reply #6 –
Have you also tried sorting your playlist by filepath?

Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Reply #7 –
...so far it works very fine if I use the sort order given by sld (%ALBUM% - $num(%TRACKNUMBER%,3) !!!

But one question is still left: If I have the same song- title in a Various CD and a CD from the artist himself, the song- title is not displayed in the Various CD. How can I manage, that the same song- title is displayed in both CD's???


antares

Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Reply #8 –
Quote
...so far it works very fine if I use the sort order given by sld (%ALBUM% - $num(%TRACKNUMBER%,3) !!!

Well, give credit to one of the guys here who are able to code (forgot his handle/nickname). I know next to nothing about coding. 

Help needed: How to display "Various Artists" ?

Reply #9 –
Quote
But one question is still left: If I have the same song- title in a Various CD and a CD from the artist himself, the song- title is not displayed in the Various CD. How can I manage, that the same song- title is displayed in both CD's???

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but try something like this on for size:

Code: [Select]
$if2(%album artist%,%artist%) - %album% - $num(%tracknumber%,2) - $if(%album artist%,%artist% - ,)%title%


What that code snippet does (feel free to modify it) is display the album artist first, if it exists, but if it doesn't, display the artist name. Later, before the track title, if it's a track with an album artist field, it'll display the artist field before the title. It'll give results something like this: (copied from my playlist  )

Quote
Various Artists - Matrix OST - 02 - Propellerheads - Spybreak!
Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin II - 04 - Thank You


Should work pretty good for most applications.