mp3 tagging problem, please help a newbie

[shrunkenmaster]

I'm having trouble with mp3 tags. It's happening when a particular artist has a 'featured' guest on a track. For example, a CD by Estelle called "Shine" - most of the album tracks show up associated with the album, except any that have a guest. In this case, each of these tracks show up as a separate album, ie. Estelle feat. Cee-Lo "Shine", with the album having just that track. These rogue albums don't show any artwork either, so they must be being read as totally different albums.

I've re-tagged the offending articles with three (!) different programs now and the problem won't go away. By the way, I've updated the database each time.

Hope I've explained things properly. Am I missing something obvious here?

Cheers,

Ian

[BaddaBing]

The MP3 tag sorting that XL uses looks at the artists list, if more than one artist is listed it tends to sort those as "Various Artists". Only way to get past it is to either remove that info from the MP3 tag or manually edit the XL database after import.

[shrunkenmaster]

The MP3 tag sorting that XL uses looks at the artists list, if more than one artist is listed it tends to sort those as "Various Artists". Only way to get past it is to either remove that info from the MP3 tag or manually edit the XL database after import.

Wow, quick reply! There's nothing to remove from the mp3 tags - I can't see where XL is reading this data from, as when I look at the tag data in mediarage/itunes/mp3tag etc, all the tracks for each of the problem albums has the same artist name and the same album title. This 'featuring' data only appears in XL. Very strange methinks.

I'll try the manual edit as suggested, but this'll take a while over a large collection.

Thanks for the advice, nice skins by the way!

Ian

[ironcross]

Which tag version are you editing? V1 or V2? Xlobby might be looking at one you aren't editing. Try ID3-TagIt or MP3Tag 2.42.

[slaman]

I use a set of tags called "originalartist" to put the album's artist in, and leave the "artist" tag as the track's artist.

Then I sort all albums by "originalartist" so that the albums show up correctly.

[dhcf23]

One thought on this is maybe you imported those before they were all properly tagged, so you have those records in your music DB, now you have tagged them properly and imported again adding all the properly tagged songs to one album and the rest are still there from the previous import. Manually remove all the estelle entries from the DB and reimport, or delete the DB and reimport the whole thing and see if that does it.

As far as tagging goes I usually just highlight all the songs in an album, right click - properties and make sure the album name and artist name and genre are the same for all tracks by entering it there. Then edit individual track names/numbers if needed one by one.