Difference between Artist and Album Artist?

Question

Level 1

11 points

Difference between Artist and Album Artist?

I just bought an iPod. I'm in the process of naming all my music in the iTunes Get Info window. I'm confused though. What's the difference between Artist and Album Artist?

Dual-core 2GHz PowerPC G5, Mac OS X (10.4.11), 9 GB 533 DDR2 SDRAM

Posted on Jul 25, 2008 11:10 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Matthew Smith

Level 5

6,800 points

Jul 26, 2008 3:26 AM in response to IlMolto

The album artist could be the artist that is releasing the album, but one of the tracks may be a duet with someone. Thus that one track would have both their names on it.

Reply

Answer 2

PT

Level 7

20,888 points

Jul 26, 2008 3:35 PM in response to IlMolto

Album artist allows you to group the entire album together under one artist name in the case where two or more of the songs are created to different or additional artist in the artist tag.
See this past post of mine for further details and an example...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7491444&#7491444
Cheers,
Patrick

Reply

Answer 3

IlMolto Author

Level 1

11 points

Jul 27, 2008 3:14 AM in response to PT

Thank you both for your input.

The reason I ask is because I have many livesets and promo mixes by DJs on my iPod. It would be nice to have a field for "Compilation Artist" or a "Mixed By" tag for compilations or DJ mixes that feature completely different artists.

This is what I thought the "Album Artist" field was for, but what good is it when it doesn't show that info on my brand new 3 day old 80 GB iPod Classic... Instead, it tells me that there's various artists.

Anyone know a work around?

Reply