Various Artists GSoC project

[Stuart Neill]

On Tuesday 31 Mar 2009 02:53:17 kevin larson wrote:
> Hey,
> I was looking over the SoC projects and saw various artist support in
> Amarok as one of the options.  I have loved Amarok since the moment I first
> used it and would love give back to such a great project.  Various artist
> support jumped out as something I would love to see improved.

Good luck with your proposal Kevin. I notice it has already brought about a 
considerable debate. For what it is worth here is my "twopence worth". I am 
sorry I have not been able to give it the amount of time it deserves.

Tagging:

Organising meta-data is the raison d'etre for applications like Amarok 
(despite all the new bells and whistles being added). Tagging is the key to 
this but little improvement in this regard has been made in the last decade. 
We can not expect to see any Standard Bodies involvement while the music 
industry views "ripping" as a crime. Any progress is going to be driven from 
the bottom-up.

I feel the Amarok developers will continue to take a conservative line when 
dealing with tags. This is of course their prerogative. In my opinion however, 
it is a pity. While I know little about ID tags (predominantly dealing with 
flac and ogg files), it would seem to me that the multiple artist tags allowed 
by vorbis meta-tagging could be used to add value and perhaps enhance the 
popularity of open formats. So "collaboration" albums (Artist X & Artist Y) 
could be accommodated as perhaps could "with" or "feat." Artists.  

Various Artists

This is necessary to keep the collection list within manageable bounds. When 
building the collection database I would like Amarok as a first instance to 
"show as Various Artists" all those albums stored inside a folder (somewhere 
in their path) which is named Various Artists. I could have avoided a lot of 
tedious remarking over the past months, before Amarok 2 settled down somewhat, 
if this had been implemented.

Secondly I would like the Artist-Albums UI to show those various artist albums 
separated from their primary albums much as Amarok 1 did with "compilation" 
albums.

Other enhancements would I fear require "non-standard" tagging. I'll try to 
think some more about this.
     
-- 
Stuart Neill