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