I’ve recently converted all my albums from ALAC to FLAC, and have noticed that a number of files now have both Album Artist and ALBUMARTIST tags populated. As far as I can see they’re both set to the same value, so there’s no conflict there. Where there is only one tag populated it seems to be ALBUMARTIST.
I’m not clear on the difference between the two tags, but should I try to tidy this up (I’m a bit reluctant to go through over 800 albums again). On the other hand will the presence of two tags cause problems for Roon?
I have both on many files with no problems in Roon.
p.s. In some cases Artist=albumartist. But in other cases, ARTIST may be Sir Douglas Quintet and ALBUMARTIST is Doug Sahm. AlbumArtist is useful for identifying a common artist even though the track artist may be different. Think of all the Miles Davis variations (Miles Davis Quintet, etc.). All these I have ALBUMARTIST = Miles Davis for organization purposes.
Thanks for the reply, I’ll just leave things as they are.
I do much the same as you - use ALBUMARTIST to organise my collection, but use ARTIST for the actual artist(s) on each track. Part of the reason for converting to FLAC was that it seemed to handle multiple ARTIST tags better.
yes, I have many tracks with multiple artists, and FLAC does handle this nicely (the vorbis comment tags create a separate ARTIST tag for each of the multiple artists).
Doesn’t seem like it would cause a problem in Roon but you could use a bulk tagging program to make the change to all the files at once. I think Album Artist is the less common tag so I would remove that one.
Thanks Andrew. I use Yate for most of my tag editing and found that when you enter Album Artist it does write to the ALBUMARTIST tag. It shows the Album Artist tag as a separate user defined text item, so it was easy to pick them out and delete them. I think the Album Artist tag comes from albums I edited using JRiver.
