I also just noticed that iTunes is reporting that you have more "Album Artists" than "Artists". This is counter-intuitive. Normally you would have less album artists than artists if you music is tagged properly. You should also be aware that iTunes keeps a lot of information in it's internal database, ,without actually writing the information back to the file, so if you are tagging music in iTunes it may not be reflected in other programs. I know for sure that ratings are stored only internally by iTunes, but I'm not sure about other tags.
The reason "Album Artist" should be fewer than "Artists" is that any compilation albums should be tagged with the "Album Artist" set to "Various", so all your compilation albums combined only represent 1 album artist (maybe a few accounting for variations like "various artist", "various", "various artists" etc.), whereas the songs themsleves should be tagged with "Artist" set to the actual recording artist.
Consider "500 greatest songs" from Rolling Stone magazine. If properly tagged, this album would only have 1 album artist, but possibly 200-300 artists (assuming certain artists appear more than once).
Managing your music library is a chore. It's like anything else. Keeping track of your photos is even worse. At least with music, there is a system available to us that follows certain standards. Once your library is organized, keeping it organized is relatively easy. Classical music is even more difficult to manage. I haven't actually figured out how to do that, but I don't own much or care too much about it.
Another thing I recommend, if you use MediaMonkey is that multiple artists that collaborate on a song or album should be separated by a semi colon. Some times they are tagged with an ampersand (&) which doesn't make sense becausee Bob Marley & the wailers is a band, not a collaboration. If you use a semicolon, MediaMonkey will actual list the song under both (either) artist in the artist tree, and will only send each artist to VoxCommando once as opposed to sending 3 artists like this:
- "Artist 1"
- "Artist 2"
- "Aritist 1 & Artist 2"
When multiple artists get listed as one artist using &, it can end up being quite long , especially with 3 or more collaborators, and because VC will listen for subsets of the artist name you can end up with hundreds of phrases that it is listening for, just because of one song... BAD!
