Album Art View showing multipal Albums

[ameic]

Hi, First of all I'd like to thanks you guys for an awesome App that I've been using for years and years, I've just recently got an iPhone and this is where the problem started, as we all know apple likes to have album art a specific way to work correctly, so I've been trying to organise my albums to display the correct covers,

I have Version 5.551

Q1
when I toggle OFF album art view it shows correctly as
1 album with say 10 songs..
when I toggle ON album art view it shows 10 albums with 1 song each
now what i noticed is that the Artist (Which is actually Album Artist) displays as the artist not as the album artist yes its confusing.. even if it is set correctly in the ID tag, and if u rename the artist and album artist in winamp it actually fixes the problem, but if its named in another other program (itunes, foobar, tagrename) its as if it dosnt recognise the album artist field correctly

Is this a known bug which is fixed in the new version? im on dialup and dont wanna upgrade unless I have to.

Q2
When or will album art be embedded into mp3's using winamp

thanks,

Gareth.

[jtbse]

Possibly some confusion as to which tag actually is the "Album Artist"??

For ID3 (mp3 and m4a), the real name of the tag is actually "Band" AFAIK.

For FLAC Vorbis Comments it's "Album Artist".

Is it possible with the other programs, you're creating a field called "Album Artist" in a ID3 tag, instead of the "Band" field?

[ameic]

update

Yes I noticed in programs like foobar it displays the Album Artist field under <BAND> tag, now the funny thing I noticed is with mp3's that the tags have not been updated via winamp the File Info/Basic Info/Album Artist field shows neither whats in the band field or album artist field.. but if right click and select 'edit selected item' from in the media library it will always show whats in the '<BAND> field (as does the 'Artist' field when you toggle the album art view.

once u update or save (without changing anything) the File/Basic Info will now show the correct Album Artist info

Now I wasn't aware of the 'edit selected items' option in Winamp which I stumbled across when trying to sort out this issue, so i am extremely happy to stop using the other applications to change multiple tags,

in conclusion it seems that the File Info/Basic Info/Album Artist field is getting the info from a weird/wrong place and may just be defaulting to 'Artist' field when it cant retrieve the info it needs, either way I now know how to make all songs in one album have one cover and not individual covers which was disrupting my space time continuum, thanks again for an awesome mp3 player! cant wait for EMBEDDED ALBUM ART!!

Oh, and out of curiocity.. why does Winamp use <BAND> and not the Album Artist field?

[jtbse]

Re: update

Originally posted by ameic
Oh, and out of curiocity.. why does Winamp use <BAND> and not the Album Artist field? [/B]

Well strictly speaking, I think "BAND" is just a label for something called a TPE2 frame in the ID3 tagging standard.

Found an interesting discussion on the MusicBrainz forums here:

http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=1481

In that thread, one of the Picard developers says:

TPE2 is used as "album artist" by Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, Media Monkey, Amarok and others. WMP used it first, even though it's not strictly according to the definition, and other players followed the trend. Like it or not, it is a de facto standard now. TXXX with description "ALBUM ARTIST" is used by Foobar2000 and ... wait, nothing else

I think Foobar's useage is more strictly correct according to the ID3 standards, but Winamp's useage is more widely accepted making it a "de facto" standard.

If you want to read all the excruciating detail of ID3 tagging standards go here:

http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0