Amarok 2.0 mysql dump

[Stuart Neill]

On Friday 08 June 2007 16:34, Ian Monroe wrote:

> Your going at this from the wrong direction.

Well perhaps, but it is basically a request for information about the various 
artists that identify an album and for the album date to be available to 
Amarok programers.
   
> The database is mostly a cache of what is stored in the tags of music files. 
>You can't add multiple artist support in the database before there is first 
>some sort of way of storing this in the music files.

Both flac and vorbis files (i.e. the free codec ones) allow for multiple 
artist tags. I don't know about mp3 as I never use them. It would be, in my 
opinion, odd for a leading free software project to hobble itself because of 
a limitation of a proprietary codec (however popular). 
 
> And then there has to be a user interface for it. I can't imagine how it 
>would work without some sort of hack that assumes commas seperate artists.

see above

> Adding support for it in the database is really the easiest part and could 
>be done easily in the future.

Yes I realise that the implications of such a change go beyond mere changes to 
the database and I in no way wish to imply that it would be a trivial amount 
of work. 
 
> The exceptions to "database is a cache" are labels and statistics, but
> users don't expect such information to be transfered to other players.

Don't quite know what you are getting at here Ian unless it is another 
reference to not being able to have multiple artist tags.

> I really don't see the point of knowing when a greatest hit album was
> released. album_date sounds like bloat to me. And similarly, the database
> isn't the place to start thinking about it.

If I look at the context section of Amarok for a particular artist, I see a 
list of all of that artists albums presented (rightly in my opinion) in 
reverse chronological order. Albums in which the tracks have different date 
tags (such as "greatest hits" type albums), are positioned at the date of the 
first track. I think this is just plain wrong.


At present, in the Context section of Amarok I like seeing a list of a 
particular artist's albums and I like the fact that I can also see a list of 
those compilation albums on which that artist appears. I would also like to 
see a list of those collaboration albums on which the artist appears and to 
have all of the albums presented in order.

Amarok 2.X will place a much greater emphasis on what is at present labelled     
Context and I would suggest that these changes would greatly enhance the 
usefulness of Context as it would come closer to presenting the user with all 
of the information pertaining to a particular artist in a usable form.
 
-- 
Stuart Neill