# What to put for Artist and Album Artist when ripping classical CDs?



## cdlas (Sep 21, 2020)

Would Artist be the composer and the Album Artist be the performer or performers of the piece like name of soloist or chamber group or orchestra? 

But then, if you have several composers in one album would you put all of them with comma between them, like Ravel, Debussy....


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## Spy Car (Nov 15, 2017)

A mentioned in the other thread, this iTunes user lists the primary/distinguishing artist as the Album Artist.

With western classical music, I generally limit the Album Artist field to one name (with a few exceptions). Generally I use the conductor of a work as the Album Artist, however there are exceptions to the rule (Maria Callas and Jacqueline Du Pré being examples).

In the Artist field I try to include the conductor (whose name I follow with a semicolon); orchestra, choir, singers, and/or featured soloists.

Good luck. Who knew this was such a divisive topic? LOL.

Bill


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

cdlas said:


> Would Artist be the composer and the Album Artist be the performer or performers of the piece like name of soloist or chamber group or orchestra?
> 
> But then, if you have several composers in one album would you put all of them with comma between them, like Ravel, Debussy....


Can I point you to my long article on the subject.

Specifically, look at Section 2. Even more specifically, look at sections 2.2 and 2.3.

For many music players, regardless of whether you're running on Windows or Apple, having data in both ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags will cause confusion, since they will silently opt to display one or the other, at their whim, and often there's not a lot you can do about it. Some players will let you specify in great details which column to use for sorting and display and so on, so then that issue might not apply.

If you have a CD comprised of multiple compositions by multiple composers, take a look at section 2.4 for the basic rule... but also look at section 4, which raises the rather fundamental question of what counts as an album. My view is that if you look at the CD and see two distinct, substantial compositions (such as, say, Beethoven Symphony No. 5 paired with, say, Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6), you rip the one CD to two different physical directories and call tracks 1-4 Symphony No. 5 and the remaining tracks Symphony No. 6. As separate "albums", you will be able to specify the correct composer for each composition in the ARTIST (and COMPOSER) tags.

If instead you look at the CD and see 39 tracks each no longer than about 3 minutes, each different Irish songs collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst on an off-day field trip, none of which really 'count' as a substantial work in its own right, then it would be OK to say the ARTIST was "Compilation", the ALBUM was "Bad Irish Folk Songs (Popp)" (assuming Lucia Popp was doing the singing!) and for each track within that album, its TITLE would contain something like 'As I collected potatoes one dreadful Friday night (Vaughan Williams)' and so on, so each track ends up attributed to a composer, though the CD as a whole is regarded as a compilation.

Ultimately, it's a value judgment about what you regard as a significant composition worthy of being a 'standalone' album. My usual cut-off point is around the 4 or 5 minute mark. Longer than that, it's likely to count as an ALBUM in its own right. Less than that, it's merely a track on an album that's attributed to "Compilation".


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