Thin Ice

Windows Media Player Artist fields

 WMP gives you three primary fields to work with for musical artists: Album Artist, Contributing Artist, and Composer. While functionally different, successive versions of WMP have hopelessly complicated how these are presented to the user. In v10, the Library has a tree associated with each, whereas v9 only exposed a [Contributing] Artist tree.

 The Album Artist is the person, group or possibly composer that the album would be filed under in a store. An album of Beethoven’s music is usually filed under his name, even though he is not a performing artist (or has not been so in the recording era). In cases where a famous artist records an all-Beethoven album, you could argue that they are the Album Artist. My preference is to follow convention by using the Composer name. I also use the “honoured artist” on Tribute albums as the Album Artist, rather than “Various Artists” as AMG seems to prefer. See the Tips & Tricks section below for helpful organizational strategies. WMP's inability to search directly for composers is another reason for incorporating their names in these title fields.

 The Album Artist is also used by WMP to group tracks into Albums. Now you might think that the Album Title would suffice, but there is plenty of duplication of such titles. notably for Greatest Hits albums. So, for a group of tracks to be filed together as an album, they must have the same Album Title and the same Album Artist. If you see two album nodes like this:

• Abbey Road(The Beatles)
• Abbey Road

then the second instance is for a set of tracks with an empty Album Artist field. To combine these two entries, fill in the Album Artist field OR drag all the tracks from the second node to the first node.

If the Album Artist field is empty, WMP will create a node in that tree, based on the first Contributing Artist (if that field is not empty).  

One of the consequences of this, is that if you have a bunch of tracks that are listed under an Album Artist node "Foo 1"and some of them are there because their Contributing Artist field is blank, then you drag them all to another Album Artist node "Foo 2", then some will have their Album Artist field changed to "Foo2", and some will have their Contributing Artist field changed to "Foo2". Of course, WMP only asks for confirmation of a change of am (unqualified) Artist field. And, due to poor labelling, an unqualified Artist field can mean almost anything in WMP (see table below)

The Contributing Artist is used to add names of all the extra people who appear on individual tracks in an album. So if you have a guest artist then add them here. Compilation albums, including cast recordings, tribute albums and soundtracks will make great use of this.

The Composer field acts very similarly to the Contributing Artist field. You will find that the data downloaded from WMP’s online album database frequently confuses these, so if you care, you’ll have to manually correct it. The quick search box in WMP does not allow you to search on the Composer field, but you can use Auto-Playlists to find composers.

Confusions

WMP does not have a consistent naming scheme throughout the program for artist fields. It’s actually possible to set up views in WMP so that the Contributing Artist is referred to several different ways on a single screen. Incorrect or incomplete text in confirmation dialogs adds to the hazards of tracking which bit of your data WMP is referring to

During WMP9, the lack of support for Composer in the UI lead the WMP team to suggest that users mis-label [Contributing] Artists as Composers. Of course by having “Artist” refer to different things in different parts of the UI means that not only is the user’s library polluted, but uploaded data is incorrect too. Also note: uploading data via the album wizard may delete Composer data or ratings from the local copy of those tracks!

I would be interested to learn of other label confusions in non-English versions of WMP.

Tips and Tricks

1. If you have a favourite artist who variously appears as Album Artist, Contributing Artist or Composer on different tracks, create an Auto Playlist to cover appearances of their name in any of these fields.
2. WMP does not allow you to distinguish first name from last name in any of the name fields so you are forced to impose your own system. FWIW, I use the First+Last name for Album and Contributing Artists, but use Last only for very famous classical composers (Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart etc) when they are the Album Artist. In the Composer field I always use First+Last. (Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart). Another reason that I avoid using the format "Last, First" is that it starts to get confused with improperly delimited tags downloaded from the Windowsmedia database which use commas rather than semi-colons.
3. To better organize classical albums in the Album tree, prefix the album title with the Composer surname e.g. “Beethoven: Symphony No.9” so that all of your Beethoven albums may be listed together, rather than all your albums of ninth symphonies.
4. WMP has a pretty hit-and-miss score with splitting lists of names into separate entries, even with tracks it has ripped. In WMP9, if you added additional names in the Copy/Rip pane then it would helpfully delete everything from the first semi-colon onwards (a beta bug considered not worth fixing). In WMP10 it is not much better and you will frequently find Contributing Artist or Composer nodes that look like this “Elton John; Sting”. Unfortunately you can’t correct this at the node level as you can with some typos. Instead you will have to edit the track field: add an extra space after each semi-colon and WMP will have a second attempt at splitting them into separate entries. Note that you cannot split up Album Artists in this fashion. In this case I would use “Elton John & Sting” , which would have its own node.

   In the Now Playing pane, WMP displays Artist information from the Contributing Artist field, but ignores everything and everyone from the first semi-colon onwards.