Difference between Artist and Album Artist

[davey101]

Originally posted by General-Zod
- For a "regular" album or collection of songs, both 'Album Artist' and 'Artist' fields should display the same value; do you think I need to fill the 'Album Artist' field for all of my files to make this field relevant for an everyday use of Winamp? And how can i do this for a large number of files (Album Artist field is no ID3 field hence not handled by ID3 taggers - or am I missing something?)

Hi General-Zod,

I came here looking for the answer to the same question. After a bit of forum searching I later came across these two threads:

link
link

I use mp3tag as my external tagger. I've just added the %BAND% field as a column called Album Artist and it seems to be working fine with Winamp.

Also, it seems that the default ML behaviour is to copy the Artist data over to the Album Artist (the metadata field not the ID3 tag) when Album Artist is null - just use the option to read metadata on a bunch of selected tracks. That way, you can leave Album Artist ID3 tag field blank except when you want it to be different from Artist.

Hope this helps,
Dave