Various Artists GSoC project

Wed Apr 1 22:30:44 UTC 2009

On Wednesday 01 April 2009 22:09:15 Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> Warning: very long email, but with a lot of project suggestions.
>
> Stuart Neill wrote:
> > 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
>
> What exactly is "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.
>
> Of course not.  The album is by Ministry of Sound.
>
> > 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.
>
> I'm not advocating it.  I'm simply presenting it as an example of using
> tags according to their defined roles and properties that allows the
> information I care about to be delivered to me in a cross-player fashion
> -- and since it fulfills this duty, it *is* a solution for me, despite
> your claim.  Other people are free to use what works for them.
>
> What you are wanting from Amarok is a scheme that is attuned to people
> that remember tracks on a VA album by the artist, not by the album
> artist.  Since I tend to associate tracks with the album they originated
> from, doing an artist search for "Ministry of Sound" (it's the name on
> the album, after all) is as natural to me as it is unnatural to you, and
> I assume the opposite is true in regards to your feelings about it.
>
> There's nothing wrong with you wanting a solution that works better for
> your needs, and the way you listen to and find your music, but please
> keep things in perspective; anything that works for any particular
> person is just as valid a solution as anything else.
>
> > [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.]
>
> Which is a good point -- this problem is not simply limited to Album
> Artist.
>
> I've never met a tag format that everyone actually likes, but some other
> tag formats (such as Xiph-based formats) have a relatively (compared to
> ID3) minimal set of common fields, and simply rely on players writing in
> their data into comment fields/frames.  Perhaps they have a point, as
> avoiding the almost-everything-but-not-quite gaggle of ID3 frames helps
> minimize misappropriation of frames; at the same time, this can lead to
> even more fragmentation in the market over how to represent (anything)
> in a cross-player way.
>
> In case you haven't figured this out by now, tagging sucks.
>
> With that said, it's time to get back to basics, since the end of the
> student application period is closing in.  What does a student wanting
> to do Various Artist support in Amarok need to do?
>
> On the one tag-writing extreme we have writing the album artist into the
> TPE2 tag, which is widely-used but not standards-compliant.  Doing this
> is also likely to annoy/irritate/piss off users that care about
> standards -- which, in a FOSS community that cares a great deal about
> interoperability, might be quite a few.  Plus, if people actually have
> real data in TPE2, they could innocently set the album artist, not
> realizing it'll wipe out the (legit) data they already have.  Another
> problem: TPE2 is only in ID3.

I don't really think this is a valid argument for avoiding the TPE2-as-album-
artist thing. You do recommend using this route later on in your email, but 
nevertheless I think sticking to a standard for pure ideological reasons is 
the wrong solution. This brings to mind wheels' refusal to integrate various 
codecs in taglib, and we know how much of a pain that is to deal with :) I 
think we should keep in mind the FOSS aspect of it but not let it impede the 
usability of Amarok---we've never  been about ideology over usability, and 
shouldn't be. 

> On the other tag-writing extreme we have things like metadata profiles,
> which sound cool but the average user will never, ever figure out.

yep, this would be the most confusing feature ever :P

> Across the field there are methods that use Amarok's smartness and
> database to try to kludge something together.  These tend to break easily.
>
> My fellow developers have been conspicuously silent on this issue, so
> I'll go ahead and say my preference.  Bear with me; it's long, but it
> covers most/all corner cases I can think of.

ok fine, you made me speak up..

> 1) When writing tags:
>
> For non-ID3-based formats, try to interoperate with other players in
> terms of the format used.  This will generally be a free-text comment;
> if you can interoperate with other players without needing to write
> player-specific tags, great.  Reading other players' player-specific
> tags is nice, but please then either write our own (probably necessary
> with ID3 at least since players are supposed to identify which player
> wrote the comment) or write a generic one if you can drum up support
> among other players.
>
> For ID3 tags: Implement support for using TPE2, but make the user aware
> that it is not standards-compliant and may overwrite existing
> information.  In other words, if you are using the tag editing dialog to
> write these tags, I would have the field listed as something like
> Band/orchestra/accompaniment/Album Artist* with an explanation --
> somewhere on the tag dialog, or perhaps  on a QWhatsThis that pops up
> when you click Album Artist or the asterisk -- that this field is
> commonly used for Album Artist, but doing so does not adhere to the ID3
> standard.  They should be able to choose whether to write the Album
> Artist in TPE2 (breaks standards, more portable), or whether to write it
> in a comment (standards-compliant, less portable).
>
> When implementing album artist/VA support throughout Amarok using values
> from TPE2 you'd have to keep something else in mind as well, and this is
> where things actually get difficult (if you don't want to put a burden
> on the user): you can never assume that the TPE2 field being filled in
> indicates an album artist, as opposed to someone that is using TPE2 for
> its intended purpose (for instance someone with a Frank Sinatra track
> that has TPE2 set to "The Frank Mane Band", and where the band is
> different on various tracks on the album).
>
> This problem is very hard.
>
> The best solution I've come up with is the following:
>
> If users either users choose to write text into the TPE2 tag and also
> check a "Various Artists" checkbox, or if they simply mark an album as
> being Various Artists from the Collection Browser, write a comment into
> the file with a value indicating that the track is a various artists
> track -- IsVariousArtists or TPE2_CONTAINS_ALBUMARTIST or something.
> The point is, something that we can pick up on next time during the next
> scan, so that we can be sure that once the user notes that it's a
> Various Artists track, they never have to do so again.
>
> In the case that these values don't exist you could still try to do
> smartness with things like grouping together different values of the
> TPE2 field, or possibly try to do some smartness where if you have
> multiple tracks with the same Album Artist and the same Album Name and
> none of the track #s overlap, then they are probably VA tracks.  But as
> I said, these kinds of algorithms, while they can be decent, always
> break down somewhere.  Hence why we should ensure that if the user tells
> Amarok that these tracks are VA tracks once, we should never forget it.

I totally agree with all the remembering-once-the-user-has-chosen stuff. 
Really, thats the easy use case because we know what the user means as he is 
telling us. 

The important part (in my opinion) is that Amarok should do the best it can 
when scanning and finding files tagged with the TPE2 tag. Obviously we can't 
always assume TPE2 to be the album artist, as there are legitimate uses of 
TPE2 (especially classical music). But rather than do nothing, something where 
we check if a) all tracks are in the same folder b) all tracks have the same 
album name and (if they exist) differing track numbers, would go a long way to 
make VA support usable.

my 2c

leo

-- 
-----
lfranchi at kde.org		Tufts  University 2010
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu                The KDE Project