[Navyblue]

Can you J3 owners enlighten me:

- does it recognize "album artist" tag? (Zune does this, iPod doesn't)

- in album view, does it sort albums according to artist? (Sony does this, Zune and iPod won't)

The reason I ask is I wanted to get an ipod but I hate how it handle compilations, not to mention ALAC. If I have 10 different artists in my collection and 2 compilations that have tracks from 20 artists, my artist list of 10 will be bumped up to a mighty 30 which made browsing much harder to have to go through all that mess. With Zune the compilations can simply be grouped under "various artist" in "album artist" tag. In Sony the album view would group the compilation together.

I need a player with good battery life and capacity that also sounds good. Zune and Clip+ fail in battery life, iPod fails in UI and Sony didn't make it for me in SQ. If Cowon won't work for me I am going Apple.

 

[Rat Salad]

I know your pain.. I do not generally move variour artists albums to my player for this reason, 
 
I moved the Blues Brothers album to my J3 to check this out for sure.  For the track "Think" in Media Monkey album artist is "Blues Brothers" and the Artist is "Aretha Franklin"
 
In the J3 main menu---> Artist = Aretha.  There is no album artist option.   So the artist list is expanded for each artist on the album
 
Tags used for string in J3 are:
Folder
Artists
Albums
Songs
Genres
Years
 
I somtimes use the folder option which, if you name folders at the album artists level you can cut down on artist count.  Not only is that a hassle but the folder browser option is like 2 menus lower that the artist browser. 
 

 

[Navyblue]

From the J3 thread, someone recommended by leaving track artist tag as "various artist" (or in your case "Blues Brothers"), and append the track name with the track artist's name. The J3 at least has the folder browsing as workaround. So far the only 2 brands that handles compilation well is Sony, followed by Zune. It seems strange that other companies had never thought about how their media browsing handles compilations, especially Apple who pride themselves with their "user experience" and have been marketing DAP since a decade ago. Strangely iTunes can at least group compilations together.

 

[Rat Salad]

 
I have done the various artists and added artist name to song title in past.  I just hat those long song names it creates.  I am soo particular its a curse!  

 

[Navyblue]

Correction:
 
It turns out that iTune can mark albums as compilation and the individual artist name won't show up in the artist list. The album would also appear under "compilation". I managed to do that with iPod Classic (and other iPods work the same I believe). So Apple had thought about it after all.