Various Artists in Amarok 2.0

[Stuart Neill]

On Monday 15 December 2008 16:12:37 Jan Holthuis wrote:
> Handling compilations has still a few flaws in Amarok 2:

I agree, it is an extremely weak area in comparison to Amarok 1. Could not 
tracks contained in a parent or grandparent folder marked "Various" or 
"Various Artists" be collected as such. Alternately, perhaps a tickbox in 
Settings > Configure - Amarok > Collection should allow the user to set the 
default.

>
> 1:
> This probably the most severe bug:
> Let's say you have a compilation (an album by that contains tracks by
> multiple artists). Because amarak doesn't recognize automatically that it's
> a compilation, it displays each artist with his own album. If you select
> some albums in the collection browser, then rightclick and using »Show
> under Various Artists«, it works just fine. Unfortunatly, if you forgot to
> do that to one single track (and therefore one single »album«), Amarok
> creates a second VA-album that contains all the tracks before plus the one
> you just added.
>
> 2:
> In Amarok 1.4 I often entered the compilation's name into the collection's
> quicksearch box. Then I expanded one artist entry so see the album, did a
> CTRL+A and did a rightclick and used »Show under Various Artists«. Now that
> doesn't work anymore. Instead I have to expand every singe artist and only
> select their albums (via CTRL+Leftclick). That a big disadvantage in
> comparison to Amarok 1.4.10 (at least for me)
>
> 3:
> It's also very annoying that every time you do what I described in no. 2,
> »Local Collection« in the collection browser is collapsed.

Having just gone through my collection re-setting all the "Various Artist" 
albums, I can confirm that it is a long and tedious process made all the more 
annoying by the collapsing of the collection browser at each step.

In addition, after doing this for several albums, the process progressively 
slows to a crawl. For anyone about to do this, I would advise that you do it 
in small batches, restarting Amarok in-between.
>
> 4:
> The way compilations are displayed in the playlist is not very nice,
> especially if the collection contains 2 tracks by the same artist and one
> of them is right behind the other one. Then you have something like this: →
> http://img366.imageshack.us/img366/280/lol1dx6.png (I kinda faked the
> example by dragging the same track into the playlist twice, but I hope you
> get the idea) Instead, it could be something like this (mockup):
> http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/8840/lol2yd6.png
>
> But for all that, Amarok 2 Is a great player and I'm looking forward to
> future versions. (especially versions with a working queue manager :D) 

-- 
Stuart Neill