CDDB searches will return some terrible tags. The worst are with dance compilations where there is an original artist (a composer) and a remixer (artist).
Main artist plus guest: A tricky one. Case in Point: Tom Jones "Reload"- 17 songs, each with a guest artist. I entered "Tom Jones & _" as the artist tag for each song, which gave me 17 artists. This is a pain to scroll through, plus the focus is supposed to be on Tom Jones, as it's his record. The way I solved this was to add "(Feat. _)" to the end of every song name tag. This gave me 17 Tom Jones songs, but I kept a note of who he was performing with. This is a trick inspired by the sleeve notes on dance compilations.
I do a very similar thing and essentially for the same reason. It happens all the time on rap albums. I just leave the artist the the CD was released under in the Artist field and add "ft. ..." to the song name. This way the information is there, but it doesn't create 20 different artists with 1 song a piece.
I have about 11,000 songs in my itunes library at the moment, and little things like this really make a difference. It also helps if you make these decisions early on in your tagging career.
by on Feb 16 | 9:32 pm
The script called "replace text" from Doug's Applescripts is a great way to get these types of tags up to snuff. It lets you do keyword find and replace operations against artist, title, and album.
by dfbills on Feb 20 | 1:32 am
Here is the link to Replace Text, that DFB mentioned. : )
I do a very similar thing and essentially for the same reason. It happens all the time on rap albums. I just leave the artist the the CD was released under in the Artist field and add "ft. ..." to the song name. This way the information is there, but it doesn't create 20 different artists with 1 song a piece.
I have about 11,000 songs in my itunes library at the moment, and little things like this really make a difference. It also helps if you make these decisions early on in your tagging career.