HydrogenAudio

Hydrogenaudio Forum => General Audio => Topic started by: KRIM on 2012-02-26 08:23:30

Title: Advice on tagging & encoding for most compatibility across sof
Post by: KRIM on 2012-02-26 08:23:30
I'm planning to rebuild my music collection (FLAC/CD > lossy) from scratch, as I started off a bit messy with all types of different sources. I haven't chosen which lossy format to go with yet, it's down to MP3 V0 and AAC VBR. But it will likely depend on how well it supports my biggest hurdle so far; multiple tags across fields (artist, genre, etc.) But mostly artist.

On the desktop side there's ample support for this, and I've personally gone with foobar2000. The properly tagged songs show up on all artist sections without creating multiple entries. Once I'm on the go however, things aren't so bright. Unfortunately the PMP support is simply horrid. I have an iPad and Android phone, and none of their respective music players support the multiple artists tag. As such one's collection quickly clutters. Having "Artist A / Artist B / Artist C" as its own artist, while redundantly having each individual also as separate artists, becomes frustrating for large libraries featuring many collabos.

My current set-up involves my own manually managed folder, which is watched and updated by iTunes, and foobar2000 serves as my main audio player. I want to keep my multiple artists support within foobar, while avoiding the multiple entries issue for software that doesn't support this feature (yet). Is there a particular method in circumventing this completely or at least to a manageable state? I've read a little while back it's possible to tag songs properly in foobar, and the aforementioned 'other' software will only take the first entry. So in foobar songs will be under both "Artist A" and "Artist B", but on something like iOS/Android it will be under "Artist A" only. Not the best solution, but this is something I could settle for. I just need help in precisely how to pull it off.

I'll take whatever advice and recommendations I can get. Since I'm starting from scratch, I want to ensure I'm future-proofing my collection so it becomes easy to manage down the line.