Album artists and track artists

Album-artist metadata supplies album-level credit and grouping context independently of each track’s performer credit.

Harbour Sessions is credited to Mira Vale at album level. On one track she performs alone; on another she is joined by the Harbour Quartet. The album can retain one album-level credit while the tracks describe their different performers.

That is the purpose of separating album artist from track artist. The first supplies album context. The second describes the credit attached to a particular track.

Fictional track Album artist Track artist
River Lights Mira Vale Mira Vale
Night Crossing Mira Vale Mira Vale with Harbour Quartet
Morning Tide Mira Vale Mira Vale

Changing the album-artist value to match each track's guests can turn one intended album into several grouping contexts. Keeping the track credits distinct preserves the guests without losing the album's shared description.

Emby's music documentation describes album and album-artist consistency as relevant to grouping. The embedded fields supply this meaning even when all three files already occupy one folder.

A field name can be a convention

Tag formats do not all use the same physical field names:

Common album-artist mapping Storage convention
ID3v2 TPE2
Vorbis comments ALBUMARTIST
Common iTunes-style MP4 metadata aART

Picard documents these mappings. The ID3 definition of TPE2 is band/orchestra/accompaniment; its widespread album-artist use is a tagging convention layered on that field. A tag editor's friendly “Album artist” label is therefore an interpretation of stored data, not a universal string appearing identically in every format.

A composer field answers another question. A classical album can credit a composer, conductor, orchestra and soloist in different roles. Classical credits develops those scopes.

Display text and contributor identities

The credit Mira Vale with Harbour Quartet is readable presentation text. A structured model can retain Mira Vale and Harbour Quartet as separate contributor identities, plus the joining phrase with.

Treating the whole display string as a single artist can create a synthetic catalogue identity. Splitting it at every space or punctuation mark loses the joining phrase and can damage actual names.

Multi-valued tags can carry several contributors, subject to the tagger and reader's conventions. Emby documents a supported separator for its music artist values. A comma inside a name is not automatically evidence of two people.

See Also

References