Various Artists GSoC project

[Stuart Neill]

On Tuesday 31 Mar 2009 13:37:05 Jeff Mitchell wrote:
>
> Personally, I put the information in the title, and use the Artist tag
> for the artist advertised on the album.  This has the added benefit of
> making it easy to find all tracks on an album and having that album
> sorted and collated properly in the Collection Browser, without having
> to have an artist view show a bunch of artists with one single track:
>
> Album: Crazy Techno vol 2
> Artist: Ministry of Sound
> Track Title: Blowing Your Mind [TechnoCode f. John Blaze]
>
> Doing it this way ensures that no matter where I take my files, I'll
> always get all the information from the track, without having to worry
> about non-conforming players.  It's both standards-compliant* _and_ easy
> to use and organize.
>
This strikes me as being close to minimal tagging and therefore restricting 
the potential use of applications such as Amarok. Is Ministry of Sound an 
Artist (I would have thought they were more akin to a publisher). If you have 
an album by TechnoCode, the Albums widget UI will not show your "Crazy Techno" 
album for that Artist.

I have just looked at the list of albums  which I have marked as "show as 
Various Artists". Typically these would be Genre based (e.g. Acoustic 04 or 
Cafe de Paris), Tribute based (e.g. Poet: A Tribute to Townes Van Zandt or 
Golden Age Of Electra Records) or movie soundtracks. Where is the "artist 
advertised on the album" for these.

The method you advocate may work for you but it is in no sense a solution and 
I would not think it is a method to be followed for most users.

[BTW I also use the track title to show "featured" or "with" Artists because I 
can't think of a better place to put them. I also put the Album Year in the 
Album Title for those albums with varying Track Years.]

-- 
Stuart Neill