Various Artists GSoC project

[Jeff Mitchell]

Leonardo Franchi wrote:
>> 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. 

Agreed, which is why I do recommend this route later.  At the same time,
I don't think we should needlessly piss off those that do care.  I'm
actually much more concerned about the other issues (innocently
overwriting legit data, MP3-only solution, etc.) anyways.

>> 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..

Hah!  Dance, puppet, dance...

> 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. 

Excellent.  :-)

> 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.

Exactly, which is why I proposed such an algorithm.  My point was simply
that no algorithm can do this job 100% of the time, so when we have a
chance to fix this properly (by writing in an appropriate comment value
to the tag if TPE2 is chosen to be written as album artist) we should
take it, in which case next time *will* be 100%  :-)

> my 2c

How nicely they are aligned to my own  :-)

Well, Ben (et al.), you have two voices in agreement now -- make it so  :-)

--Jeff

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