Various Artists in Amarok 2.0

[Jud Craft]

> If you try to recognize compilations by looking for the same ALBUM-tag,
> Amarok might think it's a compilation, because both »Greatest Hits«-albums
> have the same album-tag:

But that's not how you group a compilation:  under the old system,
Amarok would only recognize it if you set "compilation=1" to those
tracks.  Since neither of those albums is a compilation of Various
Artists, you'd never do that.

You are right that under my proposed idea (Amarok groups any album
that has more than one artist as a compilation), that if the Album
names matched, Amarok could accidentally group two albums together.

I admit this as a flaw.  However, my proposed solution is not what I
would call "Mistagging".  I would simply rename the albums as so,
myself.

The Beatles - Greatest Hits (artist: The Beatles) *
Frank Zappa - Greatest Hits (artist: Frank Zappa)

I don't consider this a horrible compromise, because A) the user who
wants to maintain a big music collection usually does a lot of tagging
himself, so changing the album tag isn't going to frighten him, B) the
tag change is minor, contextually:  the album title hasn't lost any
meaning, and C) this collision probably won't happen very often, so
for a power music collector, the amount of albums to fix should be
relatively small.

Perhaps, however, there could be a technical solution:  Amarok could
automatically group any album name with more than 1 artist as a
compilation.  But if the total number of artists is less than a
threshold (say, 3 for every ten tracks), Amarok could notify the user.
 (Amarok has found the album "Greatest Hits" with (2) artists on it.
Should this be a compilation, or two separate albums?)  If the user
clicks compilation, voila.  Else, Amarok will handle naming as we
would in *.

It is possible that the technical solution could be so effective that
it would cover 99.9% of cases, and no one would ever notice unless
they intentionally set out to make an album-name collision.

There is one scenario where my idea will fail everytime:

When there are two identically named compilations.  ex, "Great Music
in History" (contains a ton of classical music) and "Great Music in
History" (contains a lot of modern music - jazz, rock, etc).

My system would fail, because it would look to Amarok like there were
plenty of artists to justify putting all these tracks on the same
compilation.

But in my defense, Amarok's CURRENT system would fail too:  you would
manually tag these two albums as Show Under Various Artists, and then
Amarok itself would think "Well, these tracks are in the same album,
better put them under the album entry."

In this case the only way to fix the collision is so-called "mistagging."


> OK, so you think of something like »Order by Artist → Album« and »Order by Artist (+VA) → Album«?
> That would be definitely good for both kinds of collection-owners...

I definitely like this idea, and in fact, this is the big thing for
me.  To be honest, I just really want this; I could live without the
"automatic compilation grouping" feature -- I just thought it might be
a nifty thing for Amarok to do.