Save album artist as metadata tag

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Many jukeboxes allow viewing by album artist instead of track artist, but
it only works if an album artist is actually listed.  This is a common
metadata tag.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by iain.dal...@gmail.com on 18 Jun 2008 at 6:26

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I do not understand what you want exactly. Can you provide some samples please?

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 18 Jun 2008 at 4:23

[GoogleCodeExporter]

If an album is composed of tracks from various artists, it's nice to have an 
"Album
Artist" tag.  For example, with the album "Fillmore - The Last Days" the first 
few
tracks are:

John Walker - Hello
Lamb - Hello Friends
Elvin Bishop Group - So Fine
Elvin Bishop Group - Party Till the Cows Come Home

If I'm browsing my music database by artist, the album will be split up like 
this:

/John Walker/Fillmore - The Last Days/
/Lamb/Fillmore - The Last Days/
/Elvin Bishop Group/Fillmore - The Last Days/

If I give all the tracks an album artist tag of "Various Artists", and browse by
album artist, the whole album will be in

/Various Artists/Fillmore - The Last Days/

Since LAME 3.98b4:

--tv <id=value> user-defined frame specified by id and value (v2.3 tag)

so, after testing for version, you could use:

--tv "ALBUM ARTIST"="Various Artists"

Most people have LAME 3.97, so this doesn't help much.  It looks like Ruby has
something like this, though I don't know Ruby:
(http://id3lib-ruby.rubyforge.org/doc/index.html).

Technically, a custom tag is written by setting the tag as TXXX, and setting its
content to be the custom tag followed by a null character followed by the 
content.  So:
Tag: TXXX
Content: ALBUM ARTIST\0Various Artists

Looks like Vorbis comments has a Ruby implementation too:
(http://docs.code-monkey.de/ruby-vorbistagger/).  There's another here:
(http://rubyforge.org/projects/vorbiscomment/).  There's a few taggers in other
languages, but I'm not sure how you feel about that.

Attaching files with the relevant tags.  Check them out with less.

Original comment by iain.dal...@gmail.com on 19 Jun 2008 at 8:39

Attachments:

• silence.mp3
• silence.ogg
• silence.flac

[GoogleCodeExporter]

OK, so I got the syntax wrong for LAME 3.98b4.  It should be something like:

--tv "TXXX"="ALBUM ARTIST\0Various Artists"

Original comment by iain.dal...@gmail.com on 19 Jun 2008 at 8:41

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I don't need the ruby-bindings just the command like your last comment. Does 
anyone
know what vorbis and flac are using for these?

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 5 Aug 2008 at 6:33

• Changed state: Accepted

[GoogleCodeExporter]

From the FLAC man page:
  -T, --tag=FIELD=VALUE        Add a FLAC tag; may appear multiple times
      --tag-from-file=FIELD=FILENAME   Like --tag but gets value from file

FIELD can be anything you want.

Original comment by mordbr...@gmail.com on 5 Aug 2008 at 8:39

[GoogleCodeExporter]

From vorbiscomment(1):
       -t ’tag=value’
              Specify a new tag on the command line. Each tag is  given  as  a
              single  string.  The  part  before the ’=’ is treated as the tag
              name and the part after as the value.

The documentation[^1] doesn't list an album artist tag, but foobar2000 uses 
"ALBUM
ARTIST".

[^1]: <http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html>

Original comment by iain.dal...@gmail.com on 6 Aug 2008 at 2:30

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Fixed in r300. By the way, according to lame --longhelp --tv "ALBUM
ARTIST"="<actual_artist>" is sufficient. It doesn't bark, so I trust it's good. 
Any
testing would be appreciated.

I followed
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Encouraged_Tag_Standard
s as
a reference. And this shows that foobar indeed uses "ALBUM ARTIST". Too bad that
Amarok fails to pick the tag up.

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 7 Aug 2008 at 6:01

• Changed state: Fixed