Hi, I've been using the default interface for Foobar for a few years, but decided it was time to check out some skins. I set up a skin called Simply Foobar2000 in a portable installation, but I have noticed a strange idiosyncrasy: in the new installation, all the tags in the "Album Artist" (with a space) field seem to have moved to a new "ALBUMARTIST" (no space) field, and the "Album Artist" field is left empty.
I say "seem", because when I open up the standard installation, the tags are all in the correct place.
Here are a couple of screenshots of the same album under the different installation.
Old, standard installation:
(http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/8941/olda.th.jpg) (http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/8941/olda.jpg)
New, portable installation:
(http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/3849/newtg.th.jpg) (http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/3849/newtg.jpg)
Does anyone have any clues as to what might be going on here, and how to rectify it on the new installation? I don't want to have to re-tag tens of thousands of files, when there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with them in the first place.
Thanks!
I suspect that the tagging settings differ between your installations. Go to Preferences> Advanced> Tagging and see if the settings are identical between them. If not, change the portable installation's settings to match those of your standard installation, then restart(<necessary?) the portable to see if that fixes the tagging discrepancy.
All this is is that the field that is literally named ALBUMARTIST is not configured to be displayed under the (presumably to you more eye-friendly) name of Album Artist. I think this is supposed to be done as standard, but in any case it should be trivial for you to put in place using the options in the location identified above.
Edit: Actually, I bet ALBUM ARTIST, i.e. with a space, would map as intended. Try it? The variant containing a space is default/recommended (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Metadata_Compatibility), anyway.
Thanks both of you. I took the advice, but couldn't see any differences in the set-ups. In the event I've just started a fresh installation as my main installation was running so slow as to be unusable. On my new installation, the album art field is working as I'd expect it to, so I'll just be careful to back up whenever I'm adding a new component. I'm pretty sure it must have been one of the components I chucked in that made the difference.
Thanks.
The variant containing a space is default/recommended (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Metadata_Compatibility), anyway.
Not completely true, Peter has explicitly changed at least the writing of Vorbis and FLAC comments in 1.1.8 (your link is related to 1.1.6 changes) to write the Album Artist to the ALBUMARTIST field instead of ALBUM ARTIST, to improve compatibility with other software. Since this is the default way foobar2000 writes Album Artist tags now, I think the recommendation is to use ALBUMARTIST instead of ALBUM ARTIST, at least for Vorbis and FLAC.
My mistake; thanks for the correction.
foobar2000 writes either field to Vorbis/FLAC/Speex files as "ALBUMARTIST" or "ALBUM ARTIST" depending on the configuration setting, but reads both back as "ALBUM ARTIST".