Both Discogs & MusicBrainz insert values into the “Album Artist” field and it would be useful to have an option to ignore this for “Various Artist” albums and leave the field blank.
This way iTunes can automatically handle this instead, which makes the field show up in the local language for example.
I looked at the Manipulators but it doesn’t seem possible to do this with them at the moment.
Please explain further, how does iTunes handle things if left blank
If the “Compilation” checkbox is enabled so that the tracks are grouped together properly as one album, then iTunes will automatically label it as “Various Artists” (or the translated version if you aren’t using an English version) when the Album Artist field is empty.
If the Album Artist field has been filled in it will show that instead, which is not desirable for VA albums. One drawback being that the album will be sorted under “V”. With the Album Artist field empty you get the VA albums grouped at the end instead.
Thanks, I’ll look into this sounds like another option is needed or perhaps it should just do this anyway.
Hi, just tried this with latest version of iTunes (11.0.1.12), at first I couldn’t get the behaviour you describe, then eventually I got something a bit similar but a little different.
I cleared all the songs out of iTunes then started iTunes with language sent to French so I could see when iTunes was translating something.
I added a set of songs from Jaikoz that had the compilation flag set and the album artist and album sort artist blank (set 1)
I then added a set of songs from Jaikoz that had the compilation flag set and the album artist set to Various Artists (set 2)
I then added a set of songs from Jaikoz that did not have the compilation flag set, were all by the same artist but only had the artist field and not the album artist(set 3)
I then added a set of songs from Jaikoz that did have the compilation flag set, were all by the same artist but only had the artist field and not the album artist(set 4)
Within iTunes in the classic Songs view with the Tag Browser, the artists column only contained Compilations and the artist from set 3, so I was suprised that firstly it doesn’t look at the song artist at all if marked as a compilation, secondly it doesn’t use the album artist either (even though album artist was set to Various Artists, thirdly because album artist is ignored all the compilations are actually kept together.
Also in contrast to what you appeared to be saying the Album Artist field of the songs where it is blank (set 2) is not automatically set to the equivalent to Various Artist based on the language set in iTunes
However if I then go to the Album View we do see a difference because the album that has release artist set to Various Artist is labelled as such and the album with no release artist set is attributed to Artistes Divers (the French for Various Artists), the single artist release is correctly listed despite not having release or sort release artist set, funnily enough the single artist compilation is alao added as if it was a single artist i.e on this view it seems to be ignored that it is marked as a compilation but its not ignored in the songs view
Its a similar story if I go to the Artist View.
So I think there is a case for what you want, however because iTunes doen’t actually populate the Release artist field if left blank and most applications dont understand the iTunes compilation flag Im not sure this should only be done by default only if using iTunes - because I expect these applications depend on the release artist being set to Various Artist,
And now I have a dilemma because I had decided to add this to SongKong first, but I really want to keep SongKong simple and not add additional preferences if I can help it.