Feature for Ipod syncing: Map Album Artist to Artist [#7441]

[Jon EP]

Hi,

It would be great if there were a checkbox for device syncing whereby Media Monkey would map the Album Artist entry to the Artist tag in the Ipod. See the following discussion on the forum: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 12&t=37652

In albums where the artist often includes different artists on different songs, thus producing, in effect, a compilation, the album artist category allows the album to be maintained together. For instance, on an album by Elvis Costello, there might be one song where the artist is listed as Elvis Costello and Emmylou Harris. You want the whole album to appear under Elvis Costello in the Music>Artists menu in Ipod, but it won't, it will be listed in compilations.

So, a neat fix would be if MM would simply map the album artist to the artist tag, but only for the ipod, leaving the MM library intact.

thanks,
JEP

[plind]

I'm looking for exactly the same thing. I'm using my iPod via an special interface in my car. In my car I can browse my music via a screen, but it only allows searching by playlists, artist, album, genre and podcast, but *not* album artist. This is very annoying and I would be *greatly* helped if I could have the "album artist" field mapped to the "artist" field when syncing MM with my iPod.

I know this might sound like a terrible workaround to some of you, but I bought MM as it is the "swiss army knife" under the media managers. And I'm just praying that they add this little tool that would be of great use to me (and obviously also to others).

Thanks!

Pascal.

[dalore]

If this feature was added, it would convince me to buy the gold version.

[Guest]

I did purchase MM, but this would add a lot of value to it. If only Apple would just add Album Artist support instead of trying to keep doing whatever they do what they do now for some whacked out reason .

[RobertSmith]

iTunes have an extended tags that could be used by iPod as an option. Using this option all compilations/album is shown by Album Artist, if this option is off all individual artist are shown. So the only way for MM to solve is to include the extended tag ITUNESCOMPILATION.

My workaround for the moment is to just set this flag (=1) using Mp3Tag (or another id3 tag editor or iTunes), and then sync using MM.

[Guest]

I'm looking for exactly this feature!

[Guest]

Any news regarding this topic?

I'd love such a feature, I don't wanna mess up my library for an expedient sorting on my ipod.

[Rednroll]

The 1st time I saw this on my iPod I scratched my head. Ever since then, I have just decided to edit my ID3 tags in my library so that "Artist" and "Album Artist" are identical. This has worked well for me, but of course if you're using freedb, or auto-tagging then sometimes you need to do some manual editing after the auto tag. But that's easily done in MM with just a couple clicks.

I really have no preference, since I have a simple work around that works.

[Guest]

There is an option to search by composer on the ipod as well. Since i don't have a huge classical music library and that field is mostly unused to me, i have been using the "extract fields" script to copy the AlbumArist data into the Composer field. Not an ideal solution but it works for me until the ipod finally supports sorting by AlbumArtist.

[Jon EP]

Just wanted to bump this topic. It would be really great if MM could convert "artist" to "album artist" on sync with an Ipod or other device, so that searching by artists on the ipod would allow us to actually find whole albums and not just tracks!

Perhaps someone could write a script for this?

Ideally, just including a check-box in the Options > Portable Audio Devices > Ipod.dll > Configure dialogue, perhaps a checkbox saying "convert artist to album artist on sync" would be great. It could work just like on-the-fly filetype conversion works--the MM library stays the same.

Thanks!

[nohitter151]

I don't think this suggestion is the best available, I've already detailed the bug in the bug tracker and offered some other suggestions:
http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=6286

[Lowlander]

That only addresses compilation issues on iPods, I think this wish is broader and would be useful in other situations and other devices with more primitive navigations.

[Jon EP]

Agreed--that is only in the case of compilations. Unfortunately, these days "artist" information is often incredibly detailed, with a single non-compilation album including multiple artists. It's especially pronounced in hip-hop and electronica, but is found everywhere. For instance, on Dr. Dre's album "The Chronic", the artist tag includes:

Track 1. Dr. Dre; Snoop Dogg
Track 2. Dr. Dre
Track 3. Dr. Dre; Jewell; RBX; Snoop Dogg
etc etc etc.

Each of these creates a different "artist" on the external device, but navigating on the device to music > artists > Dr. Dre > The Chronic would only bring up those tunes on which Dr. Dre is the sole artist.

The same is true even for Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline, on which the first track's artists are Bob Dylan; Johnny Cash...

Because this is such a common problem, users certainly won't want all of those albums on which this situation arises to have the album artist labelled as "Various Artists," and they are also not really compilations. The cover of the album, its spine, its location in the old record store, etc. all indicate that conceptually this is an album by Dr. Dre, or Bob Dylan, or whoever, so the album artist tag should reflect that. The problem is in the Ipod, for sure, and not in MediaMonkey. But it would be really great if MediaMonkey could provide a fix for apple's faulty software/firmware.

Thanks!

[carlyman]

Has this feature been implemented? Does ANY program do this?

For what seems like a trivial option, I can't believe Apple hasn't implemented it. I'm almost ready to replace all my "artist" fields with "album artist" just so I can get proper (at least in my mind) functionality on my iPod.

Love MM, but this feature would make it the beez kneez!

-carlyman

[carlyman]

Let me start out by saying I am a paid user of MM Gold and love it for organizing, playing, and tagging my music. However, the iPod syncing lacks a key feature of tag mapping (as described in this thread).

I hope I'm not breaking rules, but I have moved to foobar2000 to sync my iPod using the iPod Manager plugin (http://yuo.be/ipod.php). While not the most user friendly, once set up it completely solves all of my iPod syncing woes. Note that it looks like MM saves album artist under a %band% tag (this will make more sense once you start mapping).

Again, I'm not hating on MM...it solves 90% of my needs (and by far the best option for tagging, organizing, and playing). But when I need to sync my iPod, I find fb2k to really fit the bill.

Hope this helps anyone else looking for a solution.
-carlyman