There is a recent trend in chart music these days for collaborations, where you get X feat. Y - this gives for interesting inputting into the music database.

I generally leave the 2nd line of cart description as full artist 'Artist' (normally as returned from CDDB lookup), so to take an example the song title 'Laserlight', I'd have the second cart line as 'Jessie J feat. David Guetta'.

Thus when this is displayed in the cart player the presenter can read the full credit.


When this is imported into Autotrack, if I leave the artist as 'Jessie J feat. David Guetta' - then AT will think this is a different artist than 'Jessie J' or 'David Guetta' - thus artist restriction rules will not be applied as you'd expect.

Therefore I spilt the artists up on the AT Song card, putting 'Jessie J' and 'David Guetta' as two separate Artists - which means the artist restrictions works as you'd expect - I can't have Jessie J coming up next to each other etc. But now on the log display screen it says "Laserlight    Jessie J  David Guetta" - so the less knowledgeable presenter doesn't know to credit it as 'featuring'.

Next added complication, sometimes the input of the 'featuring' artist is minimal, certainly not one you might want to applies restrictions to. Just to keep with the same example you might not want two Jessie J tracks in quick succession, but are not worried about the lesser David Guetta contribution restricting other tracks he's appeared on. For minimal contributions I could leave the secondary artist off the Artist list in the AT Song card - but then the full credit would not be displayed in the station log.


Would be interesting to know how people handle this situation - especially in light of the fact that the same small batch of names keep cropping up I end up with Autotrack struggling under too many restrictions as the same small bunch of artist names crop up on a significant proportion of my Current and Recurrent catgeory songs.

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Myriad user since 1998, now custodian of dozens of Myriad,Autotrack, Powerlog and Scoop boxes of many different flavours.
http://www.philedmonds.com