multiple artists or Various

Just to add to this...

Get Info has a checkbox to mark albums by various artists as Compilations. This lets iTunes know to treat these collections differently from other albums.

My personal preference is to mark such as albums as Compilation, but leave the Album Artist field empty. Writing Various Artists is unnecessary. Besides, there actually is group that's named Various Artists. 🙂

Tech198,

Almost everything about tagging is subjective, but here is the common approach:

• If it is a compilation with each song by a different artist, set "Album Artist" to "Various Artists."
• If it is somebody's album but with a lot of featured artists, set "Album Artist" to the main artist.

So would also mean an album by "someone" (all songs on an album by the same artist, but with a few (featured other artists) still be classified at the same main artist ?

Yes, that's actually the only situation in which adding Album Artist is useful. Otherwishe, if an album has only one artist, without featured artists, the Artist and Album Artist are by definition the same, so why bother.

or is this usually hard to come by ?

The prevailing, but not only, convention is to list featured artists in the track name, which makes no sense to me.

I try not to waste my time adding info that doesn't already come with the track, but sometimes it's worth it. For example, when a favorite artist makes an uncredited contribution, or who makes up a jazz ensemble.

In the end, it's up to you. Not just in terms of how, but also in deciding if you want to invest the time in fixing or completing tags vs. actually listening to the music.

Hope I was of some help...

Two things I am recalling but can't report firsthand and verify are:

1) Some applications may not understand the "compilations" tag so if you use multiple applications for handling music there could be some confusions.

2) If music is tagged a compilation iTunes stores it in a compilations folder in the Media folder as opposed to splitting artist on a single album into multiple artist folders.

Neither of these may make any difference to you.