"Various Artists" causes missing album art

[streifenleopard]

Hi,
on my phone, a lot of the album art that is not displayed is from Albums with Album Artist = Various, Artist = XY.
Is this the case with anyone else? I don't know why this should be but, on my phone, it seems obvious.
Anyone having the same issue?
I wonder why Artist=Various is displayed after all. Who is going to think: "Oh now i feel like listening to music from various artists."?

 

[link68759]

When navigating music, most people descend in this order: Artist > Album > Songs

If an album has songs by different artists, then the album artist is "Various Artists" and the (individual track) Artist is the name of the band.



If you browser by the artist tag instead of album artist, you would only see the songs by the artist in any given album. This means your albums would be fragmented... Whereas "Various Artists" lets you view albums as the collective whole.



Use a tagging program such as mp3tag to apply album art and the album artist tags: Unexpected results may happen as a result of poorly written tags.

Sent from my RM-824_nam_att_101 using Tapatalk

 

[streifenleopard]

If you browser by the artist tag instead of album artist, you would only see the songs by the artist in any given album.

This is the point of browsing by artist tag.

This means your albums would be fragmented.

No, because when you're browsing by album they would still show up as one album (at least in any decent music player).

Whereas "Various Artists" lets you view albums as the collective whole.

No, this is what browsing by album tag should do.

This is my point: If you browse by artist tag you're looking for a specific artist anyway so you do not need "various artists."

If an album has songs by different artists, then the album artist is "Various Artists" and the (individual track) Artist is the name of the band.

Use a tagging program such as mp3tag to apply album art and the album artist tags: Unexpected results may happen as a result of poorly written tags.

Well, thanks for pointing this out but as a matter of fact my albums are perfectly tagged using mp3tag plus MusicBee and in these programmes (plus DS audiostation plus MediaMonkey etc.) all cover art shows that does not show in XBM.
I just wanted to hint fellow posters to the possibility that the "unexpected results" may be caused by the fact that XBM cannot handle "Various Artists" properly

 

[mpt15]

I agree with streifenleopard. This is happening with me too, since the Xbox music app came into existence. All my music is correctly tagged using mp3tag. An older WP 7.8 device displays album art correctly. It also shows up correct on my computer.

 

[switch side method]

Or use MPAtool from the app store. That displays albums and best bit....it will download covers or you could choose your own covers (handy if you want to download a different album cover)

 

[link68759]

asks questions

Rudely rebukes answer

There are generally significantly more albums than there are artists, which makes browsing by album (and memorizing the name of the album you want for fast navigation) quite arduous in large collections. Your reasoning doesn't scale.

It's much easier to navigate by artist, and thus you only need to know a smaller selection of albums under the "various artists" tag. No one forces you to do that: you certainly seem content with just navigating by album. Doing so does not make you superior.

This is why browsing by "album artist" instead of track "artist" is more or less the universal standard.

How is your mp3tag configured to write tags?

I have only wma lossless on my phone so that might account for the difference (there are many ways to tag an mp3 but one way to tag a wma, I believe), but I have no tagging issues.

 

[streifenleopard]

There are generally significantly more albums than there are artists, which makes browsing by album (and memorizing the name of the album you want for fast navigation) quite arduous in large collections. Your reasoning doesn't scale.

This is just the point. Of course you will look for albums by a specific artist under artist first. But show me the person who wants to listen to, say, the Pulp Fiction OST album and then goes on to check for Various Artists or for Chuck Berry. No one on earth will do that because what you want is the album (as is the case with any VA album). But anyway this was not my major point.
There are billions of people complaining about tagging issues etc. here on the forum so that I thought I might share my experience with VA-albums. Apparently noone else has this pattern of missing album art. Well so be it.

Doing so does not make you superior.

Please, we are discussing album tagging. I appreciate your effort! I think the recommendation of the programme I have been using for the last ten years somehow went down the wrong way.

How is your mp3tag configured to write tags?

It writes both id3v1 and id3v2 in UTF-16 and so does MusicBee.

I have only wma lossless on my phone so that might account for the difference

I didn't know that this existed! Interesting.

 

[dby2011]

I have 11,700 mp3s on a sdcard in my phone. I have zero album art issues. All my music is tagged by Mp3tag and all my mp3s have an album artist tagged in them. I use various artists as the album artists quite a bit. I have no issues with art. Tagging is not an exact science and it took a lot of trial and error for me to finally get correct. The problem is that iTunes, amazon and every cd ripping software seems not tag things the same way. The trick is to use a program like mp3tag to make your collection consistent.