Collection List algorithm

[Gary G. Taylor]

(This is also in the General Forum of the website)

Most people don't know classical music. They think of any musical composition 
as a "song," done by a particular "artist"; whoever wrote the song is 
irrelevant. Classical music, of course, is the other way around: the composer 
comes first, then the title of the composition, and then the artist, and this 
is complicated by the fact that many artists may contribute to any one 
recording, and any composition may have more than one artist. Moreover, most 
classical compositions have more than one section, or movement.

The current collection algorithm of Amarok (and of every other music player 
I've found) uses the above method to order things. And for someone like me, 
who listens to classical music almost exclusively, it's virtually useless.

I sort my classical music into directories:
Composer
        Composition
                Artist (perhaps several different versions)
                        Files making up the composition, numbered so they'll 
play in order
                Artist (another recording)
                        Files
        Composition
                Artist
                        Files
Composer

&c.


This means that the collection browser in Amarok comes up with mostly numbers 
for artists and doesn't show titles at all, one has to open each numbered 
entry to see what the title is, e.g.:

0912
        | Unknown
           | III. Presto

The one exception to this is when I have an entire album listed with the name 
of the artist in the directory; then Amarok will show the whole list of stuff 
in the album and the context browser will find the relevant information ... 
sometimes. Since the browser is oriented toward the name of the artist, that 
will often supercede the name of the composition. Add to this the 
complication of albums which contain many different compositions, by the same 
or different composers.

This is a really thorny problem, but if you could make a stab at solving it -- 
perhaps with a separate switch for "classical algorithm" on each directory 
added to the collection, or even for an entire collection so that one has one 
collection for popular stuff and another for classical ... that would be 
REALLY nice and it would make Amarok much more useful.

Thanks :)
-- 
Gary G. Taylor * Pomona, CA
gary at donavan.org http://geetee.donavan.org http://www.donavan.org