Various Artists in Amarok 2.0

[Jud Craft]

DARN:  Forgot to post this to the list.

Personally, I think that the distinction Amarok makes between normal
albums and "compilation" albums (when listing the collection) is
superfluous.  An album is an album.

Amarok should not care whether an album is by one single artist or
many artists.  If I look under "The Who", I should see all their music
on any album they've been on -- compilation or not.

If I _wanted_ to see the whole compilation album together (unifying
all those artists under one Album title), I would have listed by
Album, not by Artist.

I'm not saying the tag for compilations is superfluous:  it is very
useful to be able to search for "All compilation albums".  But when I
list by artist, Amarok shouldn't toss half my albums into a nebulous
"Various Artists" list just because the artist-album relationship
wasn't 1:1.  The "List by *Artist*" view is not the place to do
compilation-aware grouping of *albums*.

A list of multi-artist albums that are logged under one giant "Various
Artists" entry just doesn't make any sense when I specifically told
Amarok to list by Artist in the first place; it's not useful at all,
and goes against common sense -- a user would wonder why all of their
The Beatles music isn't actually under The Beatles.

The converse is the problem in Amarok 1.4:  if you forgot to tag a
track as belonging to a compilation, Amarok failed to retrieve the
same-album-tracks for that track.  It made no sense -- tracks suddenly
ceased to be part of an album just because I forgot the compilation=1
tag.  The album tag is there specifically to group tracks.  Amarok
should use it.

A typical music user probably doesn't even understand the grouping
idea of compilations.  He just has _albums_.  The albums group the
music for him.  Anything else (treating some albums as special
"compilation" albums) should be _additional_ search functionality, but
not hinder or conflict with that basic sort-by-album or sort-by-artist
functionality.