Edu Camargo's dashboard

I also for got to mention that, except "Songbird", some softwares and hi-end systems also give support to the "ALBUM ARTIST" (with the space) comment. At least I've read that some Sonos and Squeezebox automatically defaults to this or "ALBUMARTIST" when such comments are found, so you can browse by the artists and their related albums, without zillions of artists and duplicate albums. Winamp supports both ALBUMARTIST and ALBUM ARTIST. I think that Songbird should give this option as well. In particular, I think that "ALBUM ARTIST" is even better to read. Vorbis Comments are not restrictive, so... Why not?

The "BAND" field (TPE2) is an ID3 V2 implementation. ID3 is not supported in ogg vorbis or FLAC. These two file types use the vorbis comment metadata format which is more flexible and, supposing your preferred media player does not impose limitations on which information you might insert, the vorbis comment allows you to put whatever you want to serve as an information to the listener. In other words, besides the defacto standards such as "title", "artist", "album", "genre", "composer", "tracknumber", "discnumber", etc., you can also add informations such as "conductor", "arranger", "performer"(for classical music), "opus", "version", and many other possibilities you can think of. Any information is allowed and there's no restrictions about the fields having spaces or not. Fields are also case insencitive, and the same field may appear several times to indicate various performers in a song.

Answering your question about the "Album Artist":
Songbird, and many other softwares and hi-end systems that support flac and ogg vorbis, have adopted the "ALBUMARTIST" as the default frame for album artist in these audio formats. Use this instead. Once you've corrected the field, refresh the songbird's media library and when you right click the artist column, and switch to "album artist", it should show the album artists accordingly.

Hth.

Best, Edu.

This is by the way a briliant idea. Vorbis Comment and the ASF metadata formats handle it very well.

I remember encoding some WMA lossless for a test and I noticed with MP3Tag that ASF has the same approach as ID3v2.4 and Vorbis. More flexibility than this, I think it's impossible. Finally I think that the computer-based music formats are aquiring maturity specially in the metadata area. I'm sure that the Songbird staff is aware of this and many other issues and will do the best they can to make the biggest multimedia room for our computers. It depends on our help, of course; so let's keep spreading the word.

Congratulations people. Songbird deserves all support.

Peace, Edu.