Various Artists GSoC project

[Ben K]

One thing I've never understood is why Amarok doesn't pursue support for
Album Artist. I realise in the case of ID3 it exists only as the de facto
standard (ie it is the misappropriation of TPE2 - Accompanying Band) but it
now has widespread support, and solves a lot of the problems currently
plaguing Various Artists in Amarok. The current handling of Various Artists
should be maintained (since there are such things as compilations!) but I
think the much more commmon use case is where albums have guest artists on
tracks, or one or two tracks by another artist.

In this case the album should be listed under the releasing artist, and
should show all the tracks on the album. Currently Amarok shows only the
tracks by the releasing artist (if we are sorting by artist->album and
loking at that artist). Various artists fixes the latter half of the problem
- showing all the tracks from all artists on the album grouped on one album
(at least 1.4 did - this is still broken in
2<https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172953>),
but it fails to fix the former, since it no longer shows us the artist
information, instead lumping the album under 'various artists', possibly
with hundreds of other. In the case of an album that is not a compilation,
as I descibed above, this is throwing away valuable information.

I'm happy to do whatever I can to get AlbumArtist support into Amarok - if
fixing the various various artist bugs is a starting point then perhaps we
should have a crack at that together?

2009/3/31 kevin larson <kevinlarson1 at gmail.com>

> 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.  I have been
> reading over the mailing list archives and looking over various artist
> related bugs in the bug tracker to get a good idea what I'm working with.
> First, what I would like to do is work through most/all of the bugs that are
> not simply wishlist items.  One example I would love to fix was the presence
> of duplicate copies of songs/albums such as: Bug 1792953<https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172953>.
> Another was to have Amarok maintain the users position in the collection as
> stated in Bug 166841 <https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166841>.  I
> would also like to make various artist support an option when grouping by
> artist->album, as suggested by Jan Holthius in the Dec 2008 mail archives.
>
>
> From there I can work on wishlist items in the bug tracker (Bug 173493<https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173493>jumps out as something I would love to work on) and work with the mailing
> list to add fuctionality to better support the user's needs.  Personally, I
> would like for Amarok (or at least an option) to display songs in
> compilation albums under both the artist and various artists when the
> collection contains other songs by that artist.
>
> I would love to get any feedback or suggestions before I submit a proposal.
> (Especially from Jud, Jan, and Stuart!)  Suggestions for extensions and
> added functionality are welcome as well.  If anyone prefers to communicate
> via irc, my username on freenode is kevlar0, and I should be in both the
> #amarok and #kde-devel channels.  I am also open to using Gmail's chat (
> kevinlarson1 at gmail.com) or aim (trulyunknown1).
>
> Thanks,
> Kevin Larson
>
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>
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