amarok and classical music -- artist v. composer dilema

[Mats Ahlgren]

I'd like to chime in here...

I have the same problem Matej has; not with classical music however.

For example, Maaya Sakamoto is a Japanese singer who used to work with composer Yoko Kanno. If I want to listen to Yoko Kanno music, I might play one of the songs released under a Maaya Sakamoto album, but would be unable to use the context browser to look at "Favorite Songs by Composer[Yoko Kanno]" or "Other Albums by Composer[Yoko Kanno]". This seems a reasonable thing for a "Context" bar to do.

It would be great if someone would consider making a config file for the context browser which would allow a large amount of customization, e.g. "Favorite Tracks by Composer" or "Other Albums With This Composer". It should be a simple thing to do really; all one needs are functions for "Favorite Tracks by [*Arbitrary* Field]" and another function for "Other Albums by [*Arbitrary* Field]", and the file could be a simple linebreak-delimited list like:

currently-playing
favorite-tracks-by-performer
favorite-tracks-by-composer
favorite-tracks-by-lyricist
albums-by-artist
albums-by-composer

Just a suggestion; I'll put it into Bugzilla when I have time.

--Mats

On Friday 04 August 2006 17:21, Matej Cepl wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a lot of classical music in my collection and that shows one aspect
> of the unfortunate orientation of most music players on pop music --
> distinction between Composer and Artist metadata (which IIRC amarok is the
> only Linux player to support). I don't have a problem with my Pink Floyd
> records (although there distinction between Gilmour's and Waters' music
> could be interesting as well), because Artist is "Pink FLoyd" and that's
> enough. Unfortunately, it seems to me that this style of "everything is
> Artist" continues in the music software still. So for example, I have been
> just ripping of my CDs with Brandenburg Concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach
> which were (really well, BTW) performed by Bath Festival Orchestra
> conducted by Yehudi Menuhin. So, this is what I get from CDDB as default
> Meta data for the first movement:
> 
> Title: Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F Major - Allegro
> Artist: Bath Festival Orchestra; Yehudi Menuhin (conductor)
> Album: Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-6, CD 1
> Track Number: 1
> Genre: Classical
> Date: 1995-01-01T00:00:00
> Amarok - rediscover your music at http://amarok.kde.org: a#(fl3/,
> # What the hell this tag means, and why it has so awful label?
> Kde-encoder: kio_audiocd
> 
> It is by far not the worst metadata I could get, but still it isn't what I
> would like to get (and I understand that amarok probably cannot do much
> about that). So I edit metadata for this track to get
> 
> Title: Concerto No. 1, F Major - Allegro
> Artist: Bath Festival Orchestra; Yehudi Menuhin (conductor)
> Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach
> Album: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-6
> Track Number: 1
> CD Number: 1
> Genre: Early Music
> # that's my personal preference against stashing everything into one
> # rather meaningless label "Classical Music"
> ... rest is the same
> 
> However, this attempt to provide meaningful metadata (BTW, I have at least
> three versions of Beethoven's 5th Symphony -- division between Composer and
> Artist is just crucial there) leads to hell in the Collection browser.
> Either I will have collection grouped by Genre/Artist/Album and the I will
> have this movement of Bach's concerto shown as Bath Festival Orchestra (not
> what I want), or I will have Genre/Composer/Album and then half of my
> collection (no, much more than a half) will be under Unknown Composer.
> 
> Can I ask for smart grouping "group by Composer, but when there is none,
> group by Artist"? That seems to be the only way how to get out of this
> problem.
> 
> Thanks a lot and sorry for lengthy and chatty message,
> 
> Matěj
>