+1

While Album Artist isn't a standard id3v2 tag (or even standardized), it bloody well should be ;) Something similar to fb2k's:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Encouraged_Tag_Standards#ALBUM_ARTIST

I think they put pretty nicely what it's all about. I'm a long-time J. River Media Center (2nd to none when it comes to its music-related features) user on Winblows, and I've been using the Album Artist field extensively there.

So many good things come from this one tag, especially for those of us who are fond of DJ and mix sets, and compilations.

When only having the Artist tag to play with, you can either choose to,

1) Write "Various Artists" or the name of the DJ/compiler into the Artist tag. This will make sure that the album is saved to the same folder and that you only get one album entity inside rhythmbox. You will not be able to directly find or sort on a specific track artist in the interface however, as that information will then have to go somewhere else, like in the track title tag like, "A Song (An Artist)".

2) Write each track artist to each file's Artist tag. This will allow you to search and sort on the actual artist inside rhythmbox. On the down-side, you will then have an album that is split into the same number of albums as the number of unique artists on the original CD. Each with just one, maybe two tracks on them. This clutters the interface and makes it extremely cumbersome to play the entire album or transfer it to an external device.

The Album Artist tag solves all of these issues in a clean and logical way.

Having been exclusively a Linux user for quite some years now, I have been searching high and low for something to replace J. River MC for me, but this one feature is alpha and omega for a useful interface. I've been browsing files directly instead of using library functions to work around my confusing library,  but I'm really hoping for something FOSS to bring this tag into the game.

Being a KDE guy, my obvious choice would be Amarok - which has actually just started using the Album Artist tag - but it is just so extremely buggy, while rhythmbox seems to be much more stable and feature-rich while keeping the interface pretty darn logical. So I'm kinda hoping you guys will think this is a good idea too :)

One might propose that the set of allowed tags became more elastic and customizable. For instance, in JRMC, you could also use tags like "Conductor", "Lyrics", and "Soloist" to describe very specific things, often useful for classical music buffs. You could create your own to fit your specific needs, and e.g. when ripping/moving/transcoding you could specify custom output paths like, [Album Artist]/[Date (Year)] [Album Title]/[Track#] - [Artist] - [Track Title].flac

The ability to do things like that would be absolutely awesome, but beggars can't be choosers, so the more simple approach of "just" adding an Album Artist tag would be fantastic.

Banshee seems to get the handling of album artist correct, so they might be a good example to follow.

I've changed some of my albums' id3 tags to push the album artist into the artist field for all tracks, just so they'll display correctly in Rhythmbox. But I shouldn't have to clobber my metadata just to display them properly.

I love the fact that Rhythmbox is so stable - this is just one tiny feature that would make it even nicer for me :)

SoundJuicer w/ MusicBrainz will automatically fill in the ALBUM_ARTIST field for you, so support for this in Rhythmbox would be excellent. As an notable example, I recently ripped my copy of Santana's album /Supernatural/, which features collaborations with a bunch of different musicians. SoundJuicer put "Santana and [whoever]" in the ARTIST field for the individual songs, but just "Santana" in the ALBUM_ARTIST field. So, right now, I can't easily play the album from start to finish in Rhythmbox. (I'm holding off on changing the metadata because I'm hoping this will be fixed.)

It may not be a dejure standard, but it seems to be a defacto one, and Rhythmbox should support it.

Note that Bug 678706 claims to have a patch for this (and possibly should be merged with this).

I'm currently working on a fix for this. There are still a few little kinks that I need to work out (such as using the "Artist" tag when an "Album artist" is not found), but it almost completely works.  This is my first contribution to any GNOME project, so I'm a bit unsure of exactly what to attach, but I'll figure it out within the next few days.

Created attachment 327453 [details] [review]
album-artist: add the option to browse by album artist

This feature has been requested many times, but never been accepted.
This patch intends to fix that by adding it as an option, but not
changing any default behavior.

When a user browses their music library under normal circumstances, they
may find it difficult to sort their music based on the typical 'artist'
tag alone. Oftentimes, artists will release albums with many 'featuring'
songs, which makes Rhythmbox break each of these songs into separate
album views. If the user were to want to listen to one of these albums
all the way through, they would be forced to either browse by album and
select the album from a (probably long) list of all albums, or they
would be forced to add all of the album's songs individually to a
playlist, and listen to it that way.

To fix this, this patch adds two options in the general preferences
menu: first, a radio box much like the others that allow the user to
sort by album artists in the left pane, and albums in the right. It also
adds a new checkbox, again like the others, that allows the user to see
the album artist as a column in the playlist view.

-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/rhythmbox/issues/998.