Hey porio, just replying to let you know you’re not alone in finding the lack of an “Album Artist” tag classification in the Sansa (View, in my case) annoying.
To be clear, what Windows Media lists in the “Contributing Artists” field is what most tag systems list in the “Artist” field. So in your Sansa, when you browse your library by Artist, you’re doing so by what WMP lists as “Contributing Artists”. The problem arises when an album has multiple artists (rap, for example)- WMP lists all the artists of each song in the Contributing Artist field, which Sansa then uses to disintegrate the album by all the different artists. In the Sansa, you may navigate to a rap album to find 6 tracks missing because they featured additional artists, and now each belong to a new artist category.
It’s true that the problem can be solved by simply deleting all the added “Contributing Artists” so that the one and only artist that remains is the one you’d expect the album to be listed under. But this isn’t a real solution as much as it is a compromise because you’re inevitably losing information as to who else is on the track. Maybe you hear a song and wonder who the second rapper was, for example. And as the above poster said, the majority of us have been solving the problem (before id3 tags even got popular) by just adding the featured artists to the track name- in a sense, hardwiring. I don’t find this particularly elegant, but it works.
WMP has a good solution to this by just adding another tag category- the “Album Artist”, or as WMP calls it, “Artist”. The addition of this tag category allows you to accurately list all the Artists, while gluing together the album for sorting purposes with an “Album Artist.” Indeed, if you use WMP to retrieve all the tag information and covers for your albums (which is a handy feature in my opinion), they use the Artist+Album Artist structuring system. Of course, as mentioned, the ordering does not translate well into the Sansa, and the clever sorting system becomes in vain.
So Sansa, there is a big demand for the relatively simple addition (firmware upgrade, maybe?) of the “Album Artist” tag. Not only is the solution logical and seemingly simple, it also saves your customers from having to tediously rename all their files for some bootleg semblance of order. It occurs to me that the Sansa promotes Windows Media Player as a syncing service, and yet there is still a discrepancy between how each organizes the music library. WMP makes it easy for me to retrieve all the album information I need in a few clicks, but Sansa does not recognize the information correctly. That is to say, I cannot concurrently use WMP as intended with my Sansa as intended. Please fix this inefficiency.
