Thread: ID3 v.2 tags not working
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Thor is offline Thor
2010-01-05 , 01:42
Posts: 488 | Thanked: 107 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Asgard / Midgard / London
#9
Originally Posted by etuoyo View Post
I don't know if it is the same problem you have but the tagging on my device is well off. It only recognises album artist over actual song artist. This means for example if I am listening to an album by Whitney Houston every single song will show on the device as Whitney Houston and never tells me the artists that feature on any of her songs.

However that is not where it gets fully annoying. The most annoying is when I am listening to a compilation album. The artist for each and every song will show as Various Artists so I can never tell the artist that sang any of the songs.

I will give a very huge present to anyone that can help me solve this problem other than me actually having to go back and incorrectly put the song artist in as the album artist for each song.
Use the freeware MP3Tag to remove the album artist which is probably set as "Various Artists".

I think the N900 looks at the album name and collates all of the artists with the same album name. If there is more than one artist, it displays as "Various Artists" otherwise it shows the Artist name. Leaving the Album Artist blank (which seems to override everything) will show the Artist (not Album Artist) on the "now playing" screen with all the other songs queued up. A lot of trial and error led me to find this.

A side effect of the N900's treatment of tags can cause problems if you have lots of Greatest Hits albums. Make sure you prefix or suffix the album title with the artist name (or some other differentiator) or you'll get one Greatest Hits album labelled as Various Artists.

MP3tag will let you load ALL songs with the Album Artist as Various Artists (or just re-order), then batch-change all of them, while keeping other things like song title, artist, album, genre etc unchanged. You can batch-change multiple fields at a time as well.
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