Every other program that I have run into uses "Artist" but for some reason MSFT wants to use "Album Artist".  About 45K of my 50K files don't have that field populated.

 Does anyone know of a batch program that will copy the data from one field to another so that I can copy the contents of Artist over to Album Artist?

Give Tag&Rename a look.
No personal experience with it, though - sorry. 
Being a long-time MC user, I've long been in the habit of making sure that anything not ripped with WMP has full tags (including "Album Artist") when I add it.

FYI:  In the future (for new music that you add), you can edit MP3 tags in Explorer.  If you 'select all' in a folder, you can batch-edit the common tags for all tracks in an album>
Doesn't help you now (not with 45,000 tracks to edit); but, something to keep in mind in the future.

HTH

How do you guys handle your non-album music (i.e. singles)?  This is how I set mine up:

Title: <the songs title>
Artist: <the artist of the song>
Album: Single
Album Artist: Single

When I say 'Single' above, I literally use the word 'Single' in those fields to denote I do not have the full album for that artist and track.  All songs tagged like this show nicely in the Albums view as one album called 'Single', but the artist names do not show in the artist view for some reason.  I don't want each of my 1000 odd singles to show as separate albums in the Albums view as that would ruin my navigation in this view.

How do others handle their music 'Singles'?

As a long time user of Tag & Rename I was distressed that I could not find that function in there (since it is so good at doing so many other things.

 Then I downloaded thelatest update and "Copy text from one file to another" is a new menu command! 

I highly recommend this program, it is the best $30 I ever spent.

 Mp3Tag (from mp3tag.com)

It's the best and it's free. Plus will pull album art from the web.

 You can use the free application mp3tag. In mp3tag the 'Album Artist' is called 'Band'. You can create macros, they are called 'Actions' to automate the process of copying 'Artist' to the 'Band' field. Mp3tag can also help with changing content to Proper Case, autonumbering, embedding album art, obtaining tags from Amazon and other sourced. You can even import tags from an external text file.

 I love the album artist tag myself, and wish more of my media players / devices supported it.

I tag all of my soundtracks as album artist = "Various Artists" and so when I view it in Media Center, there's only one time that the CD appears.

 On every other device, it instead uses the artist tag which means that I've got a ton of bands listed that only have a song or two that make it more annoying to scroll through.

But yeah, I third the recommendation for MP3tag.  I've been using it for years, and it's easy to set up a custom action that will copy the Artist tag to the Band / Album Artist tag.

Long time user of Tag&Rename - OK you have to pay a bit (after 30 days trial) but it's worth it. Couldn't live without it.

jhoff81:

 I love the album artist tag myself, and wish more of my media players / devices supported it.

I tag all of my soundtracks as album artist = "Various Artists" and so when I view it in Media Center, there's only one time that the CD appears.

 On every other device, it instead uses the artist tag which means that I've got a ton of bands listed that only have a song or two that make it more annoying to scroll through.

 

But yeah, I third the recommendation for MP3tag.  I've been using it for years, and it's easy to set up a custom action that will copy the Artist tag to the Band / Album Artist tag.

There are better ways to handle this (compilation tag). Really,the most annoying part of the whole thing is that we aren't able to define a view or a filter.  You could filter out all of the compilations or filter out all of the songs where artist's song count is less than some number.  J River Media Center does an excellent job of this.

 Hey Schmoodle,

I found the same thing with my music collection (fields within the metadata were wrong or not populated) so I ended up using MP3TAG to fix my collection.  In the process I learned a bunch about tags, metadata and what Media Center wants to see in order to index your music correctly.. So after I fixed my collection I wrote an article about my experience. You can read it here:

 http://philwestmce.blogspot.com/

I hope it helps!

 Just wait until you upgrade to a FLAC music collection... you'll really enjoy M$.