Various Artists in Amarok 2.0

[Stuart Neill]

2008/12/15 Jud Craft <craftjml at gmail.com>

> 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.


While I have some sympathy with your reasoning, for me, there is a major
practical advantage in grouping albums under "Various Artists". It reduces
the length of the collection browser list from ~3000 to a figure in the high
hundreds. Without this mechanism (or something similar) the utility of the
collection browser list is greatly reduced.



-- 
Stuart Neill
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