Propose: Change behaviour that 'Amarok guesses Album from Filepath if no album-tag is set"

[Matěj Laitl]

On 22. 7. 2013 Mathias Dietrich wrote:
> although it did not work in Amarok 2.7.1 and before, we now have the
> following behavior in Amarok-git, which is according to Matěj no bug and
> wanted:
> 
> 1. Collect multiple songs in one folder
> 2. Ensure that the songs have no album-tag
> 3. Start Amarok and import the collection
> 
> Result:
> 
> Although I specifically removed the album-tag from my files,

There is an important question: if you removed the album tag from the files and 
the heuristics, under which album do you want Amarok to show the tracks in 
Collection Browser? Because if we simply removed the heuristics and did 
nothing else, it would AFAICS show under "Unknown Album". Is that really what 
you want?

> As a power user, managing a large collection of songs, using Amarok. I
> propose to change this behavior before it gets released.

Power users are just one of our target groups, please note that we also want 
to create a good player for people that don't know much about technical 
details of tags etc.

> To my mind this behavior makes no sense at all. I know other users that are
> the same opinion.

And I know other users of different opinion. For an application with half a 
million of installs, you can find a user with *any* opinion.

> My reasons are the following:
> 
> 1. If a user removes the album-tag using a tagging software, he wants to
> ensure that the track gets no album
> 
> -> e.g.: I have a large collection of single songs from different albums,
> like always the best 3 songs of the album. Although I don't want hundreds
> of albums in my collection just because I have 1-3 songs of an album. So I
> remove the album-tag. If I would wanted the all the albums in my
> collection, I would simply keep the album-tag.
> 
> -> Problem is, Amarok now starts guessing my albums according to my folder
> structure and I have to delete all guessed albums again within Amarok :(
> 
> 2. The "heuristic" to guess the album by file path is no good solution in
> two ways.
> 
> Firstly, if I use a music player which is based and works with Tags, I just
> want to it to be based on tags. I just want to add my collection and don't
> necessary want to mess around with the file structure of my tracks.
> 
> Secondly, the heuristic was broken in the past (<=2.7.1) and nobody wanted
> to have an album guessed by file path. Correct me if you find a feature
> request for this.

"nobody wanted" -- did you ask every Amarok user? I guess the developer 
implementing the feature wasn't insane and actually wanted it.

> At third, the heuristic in the moment is a bad solution: "take the folder
> containing all the files". If I throw a lot of files (>1000) within a
> folder, like "my music". All this files get the album "my music". It's no
> good solution at all.

Not really, if at least one song of that directory would have the album set, 
it wouldn't assign album to the other ones.

> That is why I propose multiple solutions to improve situation:
> 
> 1. Remove this behavior at all, if it was no feature request. If someone
> removes the album-tag he does not want it. It's very unlikely that someone
> listens to music that, unintentionally, contains no tags.

Quite the contrary, it is very likely! Many our users don't really know about 
tags and we still want Amarok to be at least somehow usable for them. Many 
access music with no write permissions so that they cannot really tag the 
tracks even if they'd like to.

> 2. Only guess something of no tags are available at all. This way it would
> be safe to assume that someone imported music without tags, because he does
> not know that tags exist, which is highly unlikely.

I'm -0.25 for removing the feature completely, because I still think it serves 
well for users that don't even know that their tracks actually don't have 
album set. 2. might not be a bad option. It also could be technically possible 
to differentiate between empty album tag and no album tag, but that may seem 
convoluted to the users.

I don't really care much about this. Other devs, if you want to change the 
behaviour somehow, go for it, because I don't think I'm going to touch it 
(enough behavioural changes from me).

	Matěj