Zune and 'Various Artists'

[htpconvert]

The Zune software does not seem to handle Various artist albums very well. For instance I just got the Kick-Ass film soundtrack, which is ofcourse filled with music from Various artists which are all tagged correctly and show up next to each song in zune. However, when a search for a particular artist in zune, it will not bring up this album. So I would search for Mike who has a song on this album, but it does not display this album.

Am I doing something wrong? is there a way for zune to better recognize albums by various artists?

[CrowdAds]

[JSP62]

Originally Posted by htpconvert

The Zune software does not seem to handle Various artist albums very well. For instance I just got the Kick-Ass film soundtrack, which is ofcourse filled with music from Various artists which are all tagged correctly and show up next to each song in zune. However, when a search for a particular artist in zune, it will not bring up this album. So I would search for Mike who has a song on this album, but it does not display this album.

Am I doing something wrong? is there a way for zune to better recognize albums by various artists?

Unfortunately not. My solution is name artists as 'VA-genre' (i.e 'VA-Soundtrack', 'VA-House', etc...)

[ZeroCorpse]

I tag as follows, doing songs individually:


Album Artist: Various Artists
Artist: the name of the artist on that song.
Genre: the genre for that song.

When I do it this way, all the artist's tracks show up in an artist search, and the album comes up in an album search. The specific tracks show up for specific genre or artist searches.

If you've got multiple artists on one track (a duet or collaboration), then do it this way:

Title: We Be Funky
Album Artist: Various Artists
Artist: Prince, George Clinton

When you put the comma between artists, it will separate the artists for the purposes of an artist search, and bring up that track if you search for either artist. If you do it this way:

Artist: Prince and George Clinton
or
Artist: Prince & George Clinton

It sees this as one artist instead of two, and acts a little odd when it comes to indexing.


This has been my experience with it, anyway. Of course, I did my original tagging in a different program (MediaMonkey) because Zune seems to be a little weird about writing tags. It tags for itself, but doesn't necessarily write a tag for the track if used outside of the Zune software.