Hi there!

I've got many discs in wich the "Main Artist" (solo or band) has guests. I'd like to keep the album as a Single-artist one... BUT being able to put both names as "artist" tag.

Here's a little example:

Supernatural, by Carlos Santana:

It's a Santana's album, but he has guests in allmost all of the tracks. If I try adding the guest as:
"Carlos Santana & Everlast" (for example)... I have 2 albums called Supernatural. One by Santana, and one by Santana and everlast
If I choose to "Show under various artists", I miss the point that the album is by Santana.

I think it would be nice to be able to mark albums as "single artist" besides the "&" or "ft." or "featuring". (It would be an option, as "Show under various artists"

Have you considered using the title tag for such info? eg: "Track title (feat. Guest Artist)"
It's not quite the same, but it does allow the album to display correctly. I changed all my tags to reflect this naming, and use the filter bar more to find tracks with feature artists.

dangle_wtf wrote:Have you considered using the title tag for such info? eg: "Track title (feat. Guest Artist)"
It's not quite the same, but it does allow the album to display correctly. I changed all my tags to reflect this naming, and use the filter bar more to find tracks with feature artists.

Thanks for the reply... yes, I tried that... but I don't really like it. I mean... the track is called "Put your lights on", whoever plays it (featuring someone else or not). I know I can find them anyway, but I'd like my tags to be kept as clean as possible.

If they are only featuring that should go into artist or title - whatever you like

But if Amarok support the tag Album Artist - this could be supported relativly easy, just sort after AA first - and if that doesn't exist after Artist.

That would also open up for allowing one composer to have made an album, but with different artists for each song. Could be dj mixes by a particular dj, lets say Fatboy Slim, that you would like to show up under Fatboy Slim - because the songs he pick is a special style.

Maybe I couldn't write it clearly...the "problem" is shown in the following screenshot:

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What I want is an option to make that album appear as a "Carlos Santana" album. Currently, i I choose the album not to be shown as a "Various Artists" one, i get 3 different albums, one by "Carlos Santana", the other by "Carlos Santana & Maná" and a third one by "Carlos Santana & Everlast"

I think that is currently impossible to do what I want... but it may be a nice feature 

I think from the tagging perspective the problem you run into is that getting everybody to agree on implementing updated standards for tagging is very hard so it's pretty rare, so for the most part the limitations that are there we are stuck with.

I don't understand the issue with including additional information in the song title is a pretty common way to differentiate it from other versions of the song.

Song Title
Song Title (Live)
Song Title (Remix)
Song Title (Radio Edit)
Song Title (Foo Version)
Song Title (Bar Version)
Song Title (feat. Guest)
etc....

When I ripped my Iommi CD that is how it was tagged in the data that was pulled from the net as shown in the Last FM listing for the CD.

To me if you have one song with the artist tag of 'Artist' and another song with the artist tag 'Artist 1 & Artist 2' it is correct behavior to list them separately because  they are different things. If the release is a collaboration between multiple artists then you place all the artists in the artist tag, if the additional artists are guests that only performed in a song or two or three, then you list them as a featured artist in the title tag.

Having said all that, Amarok does labels, so if you don't like either of the above solutions you could use labels to associate guest artists with the tracks they were guests on. I don't know how useful the labels actually are today, but as the various parts of Amarok and the associated plug-ins adapt to the fact the labels are there and provide options for doing useful things based on the labels more things become possible.

My own personal annoyance has been with the genre tag, you can only have one genre so if you have a track that could be classified as blues, rock, and classic rock, you have to pick one because if you try to do more than one it will either been seen as a malformed tag or one genre that is separate from any of the individual genres you would like the track to be classified as.

Now along came the labels and along came the last.fm add-on for Amarok that pulls the most popular tags for a track from last.fm and creates labels from those tags and as I play the songs.

So far the labels only seem to be an informational thing, but I am assuming the plan is to provide options to allow operations to be performed based on labels in the same way they currently can be performed based on tags and I don't see any reason why that couldn't be extended to include options to show things grouped in different ways when viewing the entire collection. And I do think it would be nice to have an entire release grouped under a single artists name using the artist tag and at the same time have individual tracks that include a 'feat. Guest Artist' label show up grouped under the name of the guest artist.

Later, Seeker

I agree that it's a common way of doing it. But I just don't think is the best. I think that even the "Live", "Unplugged", "Acoustic", "Rare" modifiers are intrusive. In my opinion, the "Title" tag should be used just for that. Other fields as "comments" could be used for that porpouse.

Anyway, I think that implementing my feature shouldn't be so hard... The only thing needed is to think when an album should have the option to list it as a "Single" artist album, and how that artist is guessed. Something like this would be nice:

If the "artist" tag says something like "A {, B}* & D" (where the ", B" is optional and as long as you want) or "A feat. B" => You have the option to mark it as an A's album (and back to Various Artists as well)

Thanks for the relplies

I agree with you, but note that all players expect you to add the featured artist into the title field. I have mines in the artist tag, and feel comfortable this way. My iPod also has this problem, but given that i listen full albums and i use the tree view with the album field it doesn't bother me so much.
There's a bug report, http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109084 which shows that problem. Feel free to vote for it.

There is a very simple solution to this problem, and that's for Amarok to support the concept of "album artist".
Foobar2000 on Windows does this, and it works great.

In your example of the Supernatural album by Santana the album artist tag would be Santana, but the artist tag would be Santana plus whoever for each individual track (which is what Amarok already does).

A more simple explanation would be:

Album artist tag = artist name on the CD cover
Artist = artist name on the track listing for that track

Sorting is then done by 'album artist', which would put all the Supernatural tracks together.

Album artist should be the same as artist, or presumed so if absent, when the album is just performed by one artist.


This is something that I really miss when using Amarok.

You could also use the "comments" tag, or the "contributing artists" tag -- this is what I do.

Lazlo Woodbine wrote:
There is a very simple solution to this problem, and that's for Amarok to support the concept of "album artist".
Foobar2000 on Windows does this, and it works great.

I saw this Foobar2000 feature a couple of days ago and remembered this feature request... Just trying to make it visible again

jonas posted something about this too: http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php/t ... 061.0.html

I wanted to bump this because this feature would be amazing.  With iTunes using it now as well as the iPod, this would make a huge difference.  The coverflow feature on the iPod means that I have the same album shows 15-20 times under different artists because it lists each track with a different artist name separately when in reality they are the same album.

So PLEASE support the Album Artist field!