Request: Album Artist instead of artist

**knubile** · 01-16-2007, 03:10 PM

I would like to be able to have StreetDeck use Album artist instead of artist. No change in functionality. Just instead of looking at the Artist mp3 tag, look at the "Album Artist" mp3 tag.
This would drastically clean up the number of artists that appear in the artists list.

Currently, if I have an album by say... Outkast, I get a bunch of artists added to the artists list.

Outkast
Outkast featuring whoever
Outkast featuring whoever else
etc...

The album artist for this album however is simply Outkast and nothing else.

I'm sure this would be appreciated by many and its a very simple change.
Perhaps make it an option at least.

"Use album artist instead of artist"

Media player 10 and 11 already do this by the way.

Hope it makes it in.
Cheers

**god_of_cpu** · 01-17-2007, 01:07 PM

Assuming this doesn't cause any other problems it will be in the next update.

**knubile** · 01-17-2007, 10:54 PM

Awesome.

I recommend making it an option, because some people's mp3 collections may not have that field filled in, so many of the songs would end up with "unknown" artists.

Looking forward to this feature. Thanks Chuck!

**nakinney** · 02-07-2007, 08:29 PM

Doesn't appear this made it to the next update, 1.0.7.0.

I was really looking forward to having my music sorted properly.

**knubile** · 02-07-2007, 09:14 PM

How do you know that? Its not out yet.

**Desyth** · 02-08-2007, 11:16 AM

yeah, did you blackmail someone over at mp3car?

**Nola111** · 02-08-2007, 11:43 AM

The main drivers for the Album Artist field being introduced in the v2 ID3 tag protocol were Soundtracks and Compilations. People had sorting issues similar to the Outkast example, but i.e. for Soundtracks their tag for a given song on the soundtrack showed simply an artist, album name and song name, thus adding an entire album to an artist's discography for their one-song contribution to a soundtrack. In addition, there was no way to see the entire soundtrack as an album if sorting by artist because there was no one common value in the artist field to that soundtrack. So with the addition of the Album Artist field, you'll now typically see most soundtracks with all songs using the Album Artist value of "Various Artists" and the Artist field for each track using the particular artist for that track. So point being, it's definitely a good option to have!