Multiple Artists is a term used to refer to how more than one artist is associated with a music track. This can for example describe a collaboration; from a duet to a featured appearance.


There are a number of reasons why you would want to do this, including:

  • To keep the information about the music track as accurate as possible i.e. if the music track is performed by more than one artist, you want to record this fact.
  • To be able to use Helium to search for all tracks associated with an artist, regardless as to whether that artist is a main or secondary artist on a track e.g. an artist has his/her own albums but is also a featured artist on another artist's albums.
  • To be able to record a definitive list of artists in your music collection.


In Helium, the various Tag Editors are used to associate one or more secondary artists to a track. This can either be done manually or automatically (recommended), see - Multiple Artist Editor. Once a track has been tagged with one or more artists and is added to Helium's library, all the track's artists are then viewable via Helium's views.


Whilst the sort order for the main artist can be set in the Tag Editors (and is recorded in the individual music file track), a secondary artist sort order has to be set by editing the information for an artist. This can be done by selecting a specific artist in any view that displays artists. right-click the artist and select Edit artist... from the context menu. The Sort Order field can be completed and clicking OK will save the information to the library. The artist will now be sorted correctly. Please note that this secondary artist sort information is only recorded in Helium's library, not in the music file tags.


Main and secondary artists can be viewed in the Music Explorer (Artist node), in the Artists View (assuming that Album Artist mode is off - otherwise secondary artists that aren't album artists won't be shown) and in other views that displays artists such as Genres view and Search results.