Question about using Album Artist with Asset

I prefer using the Album Artist folder b/c I associate albums to the main artist/group that released the album regardless of how many other artists contributed to tracks on the albu. I like to have all the tracks from an album in one place with the main artist without using the Albums folder.

However, I have a couple thousand albums that don’t have the field populated. I use dbpoweramp and I’m wondering if there is a way to get that field populated with a global command or a bulk action that would save time. There probably isn’t but I figure I should ask before I expend the manual effort. I have my NAS (QNAP) mounted as a drive on my MBP and I edit metadata through a finder window by right clicking on the selected tracks and “edit tags with dbpoweramp”. It’s pretty quick but is obviously tedious.

Also, does anyone know the difference b/w the “Artist/Album” and “Artist” folders?? I use both but haven’t noticed if they are different.

I’m not sure what using both Album Artist & Artist will do for you
Album Artist is the artist that released the album, but there can be number of artists (Various Artists) on that album

My two principle browser paths are Album Artist & Album (the album title)

For starters I can’t use Album Artist exclusively b/c the tag is missing for a couple thousand albums. I use the Album folder sometimes but it’s not useful for finding all the albums for an artist. I can remember an Artist name but it’s not likely I can recall all their albums.

At least with Artist I can get to the album but for some it will be missing the tracks of contributing artists.

I still don’t know what the Album/Artist folder is. It seems similar to the Artist folder but not sure.

OK you’re in a pickle without Album Artist tags, maybe there is a software way to batch fix this, maybe dBpoweramp PerfectTunes - I don’t know as I’ve never had the need

If you’ve got used to browsing via Artist, then OK, but not for me, it would find all the named artist tracks, not the album.

Have you tried using Picard Music Tagger to populate the missing fields?

Steve.

Yeah, I’m trying to understand why Album Artist wasn’t populated for these albums. Some are older rips that I did with iTunes and I don’t use anyway. A good chunk I inherited but I thought my friend said they were ripped with dbpoweramp. I’ll need to triage and see how many need to be addressed.

A nice feature in Asset is there’s a folder under Album Artist in the “0-9” folder for “Unknown Album Artist” so it at least captures all the untagged albums. I think.

I know my dbpoweramp rips are all good and the Qobuz files I dl are all good so the problem files are older rips.

It would be nice to figure out a batch method for adding the tag.

No I’m not familiar with it. Does it have some functionality that would make this task less manual?

It takes me about 10 seconds to edit one album manually with dbpoweramp. But it sure is tedious.

Just drag your music folder to Picard and click a couple of buttons to have it search musicbrainz database. You can check the results before saving. I’ve got it set up to move / rename the files when saving, eg artist/album/00-track.flac

It is OpenSource and you can add obscure albums to musicbrainz.

Steve.

Thanks, not sure I want to learn a new software.

I have found that going into the music converter directly and editing the tags is faster and easier. I guess I’ll just have to slog through them.

Well thanks two a couple gents over at the dbpoweramp forum I was able to learn how to use the id tag update function using a rule to populate the empty album artist fields in my libraries.
The simple rule:
IF Album Artist=
SET Album Artist=[artist]

is all it took and now I can see all my albums under album artist.

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