[slow_down]

So apparently some of my artists are sorted by last name while others by first.  These are all FLAC files, tagged and managed through Media Monkey.  Is there some box I can check/uncheck depending on whether I want an artist sorted by their last or first name?  If there is I haven't found it.  Any help would be much appreciated.

[mikef]

I just went through something similar with my music library.

I found I needed to re-tag some of my collection. There are separate tags for ALBUM, for ARTIST, and for ALBUMARTIST. Some of my cds were tagged as Miles Davis, others as Davis, Miles and I needed to change ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST to be consistent. I believe that SB reads the ALBUMARTIST tag, because when I changed those tags, I was able to get things the way I wanted.

I used mp3tag, and ALBUMARTIST is a hidden tag.

Hope this helps,

Mike Fox

[Tirade]

There is no official tag field for Album Artist when using FLAC files (vorbis tags essentially).

Depending on what program you used to rip or tag your music the Album Artist field (which is a custom user field) could be any of the following

ALBUMARTIST (common)
ALBUM ARTIST (common)
BAND (somewhat common)
ORCHESTRA (shouldnt be this one, but Ive seen it before)
ENSEMBLE (common if you used tag&rename)

So essentially as it was mentioned by mikef you have numerous tag fields and under artist you might have Miles Davis and Neil Finn but under the Album Artist field that slimserver uses you probably have Davis, Miles and Neil Finn

[slow_down]

Thanks for the replies.  Hmm.  I just checked, and my "album artist" and "artist" fields are identical for all my artists.  This is puzzling because it doesn't jive with what you guys said.  But even more puzzling because last month I made a point of selecting all the songs in my library through media monkey and erasing the album artist info.  Looks like media monkey or some other program somehow recreated that tag using the artist info.  Very strange.

Should I maybe try some program other than media monkey to edit my tags?

[Tirade]

Media Monkey will only show you the field it uses for Album Artist. If youre using one of the 5 I mentioned in my previous post, it wont show up in Media Monkey.

Try using MP3Tag and check your songs to see what fields you have. You might have more than one and Slimserver is using say ENSEMBLE for your Album Artist field instead of BAND or ALBUMARTIST

Thats the down side of there not being a standard for this field.

[slow_down]

Cool.  I didn't read your earlier post carefully enough, so thanks for the followup.  Surprised that media monkey doesn't give me access to all the tags that might have info for my artists!  Looks like I'll have to try mp3tag.  Hopefully I'll be able to blank out any of those extra tags that are screwing with my squeezebox library.

[slow_down]

OK, I downloaded mp3tag version 5.9 and it, just like media monkey, only shows one tag for album artist information, with no other windows like band, ensemble, etc.  I didn't see any ways to access "hidden" tags either.  I went ahead and batch deleted all my album artist tags through media monkey but that didn't help.  Ughh!  Very frustrating.  Any other ideas?

[GloP]

Try foobar 2000, make sure to install all tools during setup (so you get the tagging extension). Do right click->properties on a track.

[mikef]

slow_down,

I'm at work now, so don't have access to my home computer with mp3tag loaded, but if I remember correctly, to access the hidden tags first click on the tracks you want to change, go to the "view" drop down on the top menu bar, then click on "hidden tags" and you should see the "ALBUMARTIST" field, among others (at least that's how it worked for me).

To change the field, select the field you want to change, click on the little picture of a pad on the right side, make changes, and then save. I'm going from memory, so you may need to play around a little.

Hope this helps.

Mike Fox

[slow_down]

Foobar 2000 did it!  It gave me access to about ten extra tag windows that I was previously unaware of.  I quickly and recklessly batch-deleted the contents of a bunch of them.  That got my hard drive working for a good ten minutes.  Then I rescanned my squeezebox library and now everything is as I want it.  Thanks for the help all.