Tagging Artists /// Album Artist

Friends,
happy new year everyone.
I've never understood the difference between the tagging options artists and *album artists* which are listed in windows folder options.
Apparently iTunes does not recognize any difference, since it uses the default option *artist album* when I import a Cd into iTunes and when it's me taggign the album, whether I tag the option artists or album artist, iTunes lists the albumm together with the right artists correctly, regardless of which option I chose.
Can I anybody confirm whether tagging one thing or another (or both) is actually the same?
Or, on the contrary, if I have done wrong so far and I should tag both boxes?
Thanks in advance
Beppe

Check my previous post. If you treat Album Artist the way you've been looking at Artist this should sort things out. It's tragic bc it will take a long time to switch that over.
Album Artist is usually labeled the same as Artist bc n artist is susually on 100% of their songs. This however changes on an album where that artist allows another artist to feature without them. The result is a Herbie Hancock song, without Herbie on it, instead his featured Christina Aguilera.
Now.... If you were to search for Christina, you'd never get this one song as a result Your way. BUT if the Album artist remains Herbie, and the Artist is Christina, it'll sort better.

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Question on Lost Tags and Album Art

O.K., I mentioned in another thread that my iTunes library suddenly vanished, but I have been able to “Add file to library” to get everything back in there. Unfortunately, a lot of my album art and my tagging went back to the way it was before I modified it. If I open iTunes again and find nothing there (seems unfortunately to be common) and have to add the folder back in, is there anyway to do that with all the tags and album art in tact?

Hi Ken,
If this is what I think you are referring to Ken, then don't worry, all is not lost.
This has happened to me once or twice in the past when either installing a new version of iTunes or when I have re-linked my iPod to my other computer.
One thing to check first though:
If you open iTunes and look in your Library and select any track you like (you dont kneed to play it) and make sure that you have the 'Show or Hide Song Artwork' tab at the bottom left of iTunes (its the fourth one in) selected, can you see the Artwork for your track?
I know you are concerned about the artwork on your iPod, but this is important, if it is showing thats great. If not, it might just be switched off. If you look at the grey bar that makes the top of the Artwork box that views the image, does it say 'Selected Song' or 'Now Playing'? If it is the latter, then with your mouse just click on it and your Artwork for that track should appear.
Makes sure this is the case for a few others, and if so, your artwork is not lost and can easily be put back on to your iPod.
Now Make sure your iPod is connected and showing in the Sources list on the right of iTunes.
Now go into the iPod options menu by going to the Edit menu and selecting the bottom option 'Preferences' and then opening the iPod tab. You will see an option to show your artwork on your iPod. Select this then click OK out of the Preferences and do an update.
iTunes will then say its updating your iPod, and when it has confirmed that your music is updated, it will then import all your artwork back into your iPod and it should then be present when you use your iPod.
Depending how many tracks you have on your iPod and in iTunes, this might take quite some time. For me last time without about 4 tracks on an AMD Athlone this took about 40 minutes.
I hope this is of help.
Drusus

Recovery of tags and albums from previous catalog

I recently transferred my photos and catalog to a new computer, but was not able to get PSE9 to recognize the original catalog. Adobe tech support advised me to rebuild the catalog, which was mostly succesful. However, all of the tags, albums and star ratings were lost. Is there any way to recover those from the old catalog? I have already uninstalled PSE from the old computer, but still have all of the old data files.

When I did the transfer of files from my old computer to the new one, I used Windows Easy Transfer, which moved all of My Documents folder, including My Pictures, which contains all of my photos and all of the Adobe support files, including the catalog (catalog.pse9db). I then installed PSE9 on the new computer and used the Catalog Manager to point to the catalog. Part of the problem with the catalog appeared to be that the path to the My Pictures folder was different on the new computer than it was on the old computer. I tried to Reconnect All Missing Files, but PSE was never able to find them. That's when Adobe Tech Support recommended I just rebuild the catalog.
I was pleased that the captions on the files were restored with the building of the new catalog, but the tags and albums were lost. Are they stored in the catalog or in another file? When I rebuilt the catalog, it looks like it used the existing one, since the old catalog is no longer in the Adobe My Catalog folder.
The other files in the My Catalog folder are:
backupCt.dat
collstatus.dat
face.thumb.9.cache
itemData.mk4
rmf.3.cache
tagstatus.dat
thumb.5(1).cache (has not been modified since transfer to new computer)
thumb.5.cache
tn.4.cache (has not been modified since transfer to new computer)
watch.2.cache
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Problem with Composer info/Album Artist/ tags & duplicate albums

I recently re-organized my iTunes library, which is on a network drive in my home. Since everything had gotten moved to new directories, I deleted all the songs from my iTunes library and re-imported everything. I've never been much of a playlist person, nor did I do any ratings of songs, so I saw this as a reasonable solution.
Everything seemed fine -- Some artwork went missing after I imported everything, probably because iTunes no longer sells a few of the albums I have? Not really sure, but I fixed that, and then noticed that a few of my albums were showing up with duplicates in Cover flow & Grid view. More specifically, I found several albums with "Album Artist" info for the first two tracks of the album, and then nothing in that field for the rest of the tracks. Likewise, there would be composer info for ONLY the first two songs, and none for the rest.
What would cause this? Does iTunes supply composer info? I'm not even sure where it's coming from, but now that I notice it, it's bugging me that several of my albums don't have any info in this field. Album Artist is easy enough to fix, but I'm not sure how to fix the composer field. Does Genius change or import any info for these fields? I did notice this right after I ran Genius, and when I ran Genius, I did lose my internet connection in the middle of it downloading info, and had to restore it.
Most of my CD's were ripped using Exact Audio Copy, and track info came from it's built-in freeDB utility. I just find it really odd that I've got a couple dozen albums like this, out of about 12,000 songs, and only the first 2 tracks of each album have Composer and Album Artist info.
Any ideas how to fix this?

Welcome to AD!
I think WMP did this to random tracks in my library. Nicely filling in Album Artist & Compser on some tracks, and removing the track x of y info (the y went missing) and putting weird '0000 0A540 0000 ....'comments in the comment field.
Interesting that it only happened on the first 2 tracks of these albums - it was completely random on my files.
iTunes doesn't update track info from the internet, but WMP does. I rarely use WMP and it happened right after a WMP update. I have since turned off the option for WMP to get info from the internet.
Anyway....to fix the Cover flow & Grid views in iTunes, you have to make the Album Artist field match.
Select all the tracks from a CD, right-click > Get Info.
Answer yes , you want to edit multiple items.
Type in the Album Artist field. You can do the Composer field while you're at it, assuming you like having that info there.
Maybe there is some MP3 tag editor that would be faster, but that's the only way to do it in itunes.
Or perhaps you have backups that don't have this mess in the tags.

Tagging mixed albums

In addition to the normal Alternative bands I like to listen to on my iPod, I also listen to a lot of trance albums. One of the problems I'm having is the way mixed albums are tagged. Take for instance, Universal Religion Chapter 4 by Armin Van Buuren. When I rip that CD, iTunes fills the tag info with the original author that Armin remixed for that particular song. For example, on that album track 2 is "This Moment (Prog Mix)" and the Artist is tagged with the original artist's information, "Nic Chagall feat. Jonath Mendelson". After trasnferring the whole album to my iPod, when I go to "Artists" view, I see every song in that album (14 tracks total) listed under a different artist, 14 artists in total. After ripping or purchasing multiple albums from itunes, the list of artists basically becomes an unusable mess.
Is there a way, without changing the actual artist info, to have the artist displayed as the disc author (in this case, Armin Van Buuren) without changing the actual artist in the id3 tag?
I tried to be as clear as possible. Hopefully the question makes sense. =P

If you don't want to use crossfade playback you have to use "Join tracks" when importing from CD.

How do I create a list of files and tags in Album

I would like to create a list of all the files I have in Album. (I am using Photoshop Album Started Edition 3.)
Ideally this list will be formatted like this...
FILE NAME (WITH EXTENSION) - DATE - TAGS
Does anyone who if this can be done and how?
PS - I poked around the Menus and tried a couple of forums searches, but no luck.

Sorry. There is no way to do this [short of being an expert in MS Access and hacking the catalog file].

Tagging Facebook albums created in Aperture not working

I'm trying to publish a Facebook album from within Aperture (3.6), and am having trouble getting the tags to stick in Facebook. When I go visit the album on Facebook, the tags are there, but not actually linked to the people. For example My friend John Doe, would be tagged in the photo in grey writing, but it is not a clickable link, and when I go to John's Facebook page, he hasn't been tagged in it.
I suspect the issue is related to this forum post: Facebook contacts not syncing
When I go to John Doe's Faces entry, it shows the correct contacts entry.
When I go to the contacts entry, it has his Facebook profile under the "Facebook" field, but there is no small F under his contact picture, and when I tell os X to update all profile pictures his does not get updated. Also, it seems that my Facebook syncing is not syncing all my Facebook friends, only a select few, who I suspect meet the criteria discussed in the above thread. So, what I suspect is happening, is that Aperture thinks that John's faces entry is connected to a Facebook account (possibly from some legacy link with contacts) but Facebook's new policy is making it so that John's contact is not being synced from Facebook to iCloud.
I can't figure out a way to manually link his contact card to his Facebook account. Entering his Facebook homepage web address does nothing as far as I can tell.
Any help would be appreciated. It ***** spending all the time tagging faces in aperture and then having to re-do it in Facebook.
PS: Running Yosemite, all programs up to date as of nov 22, 2014
Edited for spelling

It shows for me within a minute. I don't have Facebook enabled. I would:
- reboot and see if that forces the tieing of any loose ends, and thus allows this feature to work
- maybe try it on a new Library, or a Library used in another User Account on your machine
- see if someone who does use Facebook tries the feature and reports on whether it works
I'm confident Library size/number of Images is not part of the issue, unless you have several thousand named Faces.
Just to make sure we are "on the same page": you go to Contacts, select a contact, double-click the picture assigned to that contact, and never see "Faces" in this dialog:
(Screenshot)

Transfering tags from Album 2.0 to Photoshop Elements 9.0

I'm trying transfer my pictures and tags to a new computer. the old platform was Win XP with Photoshop Album 2.0 (PA2) and the new computer is Win 7 64bit with Photoshop Elements 9.0. (PE9)
So far I have been successful in moving the photos to a directory on the new computer and I can view the photos in PE9. But the tags did not transfer to the new catalog.
I must be missing something basic. Is there an additional file that needs to be transfered to make the old tags work on PE9?
Looking forward to anyone's suggestions.
Cheers,
Andy

In theory, yes you can transfer tags from PSA2 to PSE9, however because of the large distance between the versions, sometimes the method fails.
The preferred method is to convert the PSA2 catalog file to PSE9. To do this, you need to create a backup using PSA2 (File->Backup Catalog), and then move everything from this backup to the new computer, launch PSE9, and then File->Restore Catalog. As I said, sometimes with older versions of PSE/PSA, the method fails, you won't know until you try it.
Another possibility (not really sure if PSA2 had this capability) is to have PSA2 write the tags to the individual photo files, then copy all the photos to the new computer and import to PSE9.

How to get started Organizing photos with tags and albums

Apporximately 15,000
Mostly family, vacations, travel, etc over 30 years
What is the BEST way to get started? Should I tag them first or put them in albums and sub-albums and then try to tag and further identify them? I know nothing of how is best to proceed.
I am oveerwhelmed with the process and cannot seem to find a starting point. I have looked at many of the tutorials, but cannot find a "1-2-3 A-B-C" roadmap.
Message title was edited by: Brett N

I would recommend doing all (okay, almost all) of your organizing via tags. Don't bother using albums unless there are a subset of photos that you want to display somehow (like a slideshow, or photobook) in which case albums are the right tool. Also, make sure that when appropriate, you add the proper captions and notes.
I would start by using pencil and paper (or word processor) to make a list of categories and tags, in the appropriate hierarchy, that you might want. For example, in the people category, there are tags Jones Family, Smith Family, etc. (and sub-tags with people's names) In the event category, there are tags Vacation, Beach, Christmas, Hanuka, etc. Other categories you might want: Location (example: New York, Boston, Illinois), Content (mountain, church, waterfall, gorilla, historical site). This part completely depends on you.
Once you have this hiearachy of categories and tags to your liking, start creating/adding the tags (and captions and notes if needed) to your photos. You can work in small batches. Eventually you will have all your photos tagged (trust me, I know, I did this too).
Do NOT: move photos or folders from here to there, or rename them ... this is unnecessary extra work, as you will be using your tags from this point forward to locate your photos (exception: if you want/need to move the photos to a different hard disk, then by all means do so).

Tags aus Album 1 in PSE 3 importieren

Ich benutze PSE 2 und Album 1.Zur Zeit probiere ich PSE 3 aus. Allerdings habe ich dort noch keine Möglichkeit gefunden, meine mühsam in Album 1 ertsllten tags zu übernehmen. Geht das überhaupt? Die Help sagt nichts darüber...Für mich wäre das ein K.O.-Kriterium. Thomas

Du kannst einfach Deinen Katalog aus PSA1 in PSE3 öffnen. PSE erstellt dann eine Kopie der Datenbank und wandelt sie in sein neues Format um.
Alexander.
1533 MHz, 1 GB, XP SP2, Canon Ixus 430 (aka S410), CanoScan D1250U2F, PSE v3.0.1, 3k images

What's the difference between tags and albums

I've always used tags, I don't really understand why you would use albums instead of tags.
Say I've got pictures of birds, I would apply the Bird tag.
Where exactly do albums come in?

Another thing to keep in mind with the differences between albums and tags.
Both albums and tags are stored in the catalogs.
Tags can be also stored in the picture files themselves; they can be accessed form your OS or other applications. They are still available if the catalog is missing or corrupt. The organizer does only 'write metadata' to files if you specifically issue this command. On the other hand, albums can't be saved in the files themselves. They are kinds of 'playlists' which can only be stored in catalogs. That's why it is important to backup regularly. The standard backup process saves the catalogs as well as the image files; if you use an external backup system, include the catalog folder (found with Menu Help/System information) as well in your backup procedure.

Problem sorting by Artist in grid view using Itunes 8

I have a lot of albums that contain various artist and i set up the info in each with the correct artist name and "various artist" as the album artist. In itunes 8 when i use grid view and use show by artist it displays by album artist putting all the albums by "various artist" in one grid. It's correct in list and cover flow view. How can i set the grid view to display by the artist of the song and not the album. (ex. Soundtrack from the motion picture Tropic Thunder: Display "U Can't Touch This" under MC Hammer instead of Various Artist)

Actually, the grid view should be using the Album Artist tag. When the Album Artist tag was added in iTunes 7.0, the intent was to allow users to properly tag songs based on the artist and any guest artists. For instance, on Luther Vandross’ album +Give Me The Reason+ Track 6, “There’s Nothing Better Than Love” is a duet. Therefore, while the Artist tag for the rest of the tracks should be ‘Luther Vandross’, the correct tag content for Track 6 is ‘Luther Vandross duet with Greory Hines’. Without having ‘Luther Vandross’ in all the Album Artist tags for all 9 album tracks, iTunes would split the album as if there are two albums of the same name by different artists.
The other situation are producer-driven albums like Quincy Jones’ +The Dude+ or +Back On The Block+ . These are not compilations, as you described, because the songs were produced for the albums and Quincy Jones, although not a performer on any of the tracks, is the album artist. The exception is soundtracks that are compilations of songs typically produced for a given film. Like the situation you describe, each track has a different artist, so by having ‘Quincy Jones’ in the Album Artist tag for each track, iTunes maintains the integrity of the album and keeps the tracks properly grouped.
(Now if Apple would only acknowledge and fix the persistent bug that does not carry these grouping and sorting features over to the user’s music folder when they have enabled “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” in iTunes’ preferences.)
The situation you are specifically referencing is that of tagging compilations—albums that consist of tracks by various artists where there is no actual album artist—but you have used the Album Artist tag effectively forcing iTunes to see them as single artist albums. I also tag compilations—e.g., Various Artists (Hip Hop), Various Artists (Jazz), Various Artists (R&B), Various Artists (Soundtrack), etc.—, so I understand what you have done. Unfortunately, the fix for forcing the grid view to recognize individual artists in compilations may require you to clear out the Album Artist tag on all of your compilation album tracks forcing iTunes to revert to the Artist tag in place of the Album Artist tag.
What I would suggest is clearing the Album Artist tag of just one compilation and seeing what happens. If the album appears under “Unknown Artist”, or some other generic listing, in the grid view then iTunes only recognizes the Album Artist tag and I am at a loss as to what you could do. If it works as you hope, then you can go ahead an clear out the Album Artist field on the rest of your compilation albums.
The downside of clearing the Album Artist field is that iTunes will revert to its pre-version 7 habits and break up the albums; that is, a compilation with 12 tracks by 12 different artists will appear in the various views as 12 different albums albeit with the same name and cover art. To keep the tracks properly grouped in other views, you will need to mark all of the tracks from the compilation albums as “Part of a compilation” in the info dialog.

How do I sort artists by last name in iTunes?

HHow do I sort artist by last name in iTunes without tagging each album?

For individual songs, Get Info has a sort field. If you have a lot of songs, it will still be a lot of work to get caught up, though.
Good luck
srb

I can't view artists name under title in compilations on my iphone

I am trying to find out a solution, but seems it's not solved yet.
On my Mac in iTunes my music collections is ordered by albums and compilations. All songs has a right tags. Albums has a Artists, Album Artists, Titles. Compilations has a check box Part of Compilation, Artist name, Title and Artist Album field are filed with Various Artists. But for some compilations I have deleted Album Artist just for experiment.
At iTunes all looks great, I have albums and compilation in that order what I want. But in my iPhone and iPad a cant see artist name under the songs title. It's uncomfortable and not user friendly as for me. Sure it's not an issue in albums when you have an one Artist and one his Album. But in compilation it's very complicated to find some tracks by title.
Please if you have any thoughts about how to view artists names in compilation under the tracks help me.
Thank you in advance.

I have found the same problem topic with some pictures. If it's helps.
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/100594/view-individual-artists-in-compi lation-albums

How should I properly tag "Best Of" Albums? iTunes 11

I've finally buckled down and decided to properly sort, tag, correct all my music in iTunes. It was going fairly easily, till I hit a snag... "Best Of" albums... I understand how to make complation albums (movie soundtracks and such), but what I'm not sure how to do, or if it's possible, is tag the album and show the original album the song came from? My example: I've got all the Black Sabbath studio albums tagged nicely, then went to start tagging their complation album "We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'N' Roll". Everything was fine to a point, (Artist: check, Album: check, Album Artist: check and on and on...) But wait a minute, the first 3 tracks were from the same ORIGINAL (studio) album, then the next 3 are from a different album.
How am I able to list the original album, whilst catergorizing it under the Best hits/complation album? Moreover, keep it grouped with the same artist field and not various artists?

If you have not run it yet, I would use the PPBM6 Benchmarking: http://ppbm6.com/index.html
A newer version is in the works, but I have not heard the anticipated release date.
When you have run the benchmark, submit the results, and then compare your performance to other systems, in the site's spreadsheet.
Good luck,
Hunt

Tagging Artists /// Album Artist

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