Correct artist tagging method

[Ashlander]

Hi all, I have a fairly large library of music, and have it all tagged according to what I've understood was the correct way to do it. I tagged it as follows;

Album Artist: Main Artist who the album should show up under
Artist: Used when there's a featured artist, blank if none.
Album: Self-explanatory
Title: Self-explanatory

Problem is that this makes pretty much every player I've ever used display Unknown Artist, even though they display properly in the artist select views. Just wondering if I'm not actually using the tags right. Only thing I can think of is to use Artist tag for the 'album artist' when a featured artist isn't present, which I find to be pretty messy. Or, to just add the album artist to both fields, which makes the Album Artist field kind of redundant.

[Lowlander]

You got Artist wrong. It will generally have at least the Album Artist. The Artist has the value of the Artists performing the Track. So a Madonna Album would have Artist Madonna, if she has featured artist on the Track it would be Madonna; Justin Timberlake

[JoePublic]

Also, if you have a compilation album like the "Now" series, many people put "Various" (or some derivative of that) in the AlbumArtist field and the actual artist in the Artist field.