Various Artists GSoC project

[Jeff Mitchell]

Ben K wrote:
> 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.

You seem to be contradicting yourself.  You want to put the album artist
in TPE2 -- but then what do you do with the "much more common use case"
where there are guest artists -- in which case those belong in TPE2?

I'm not sure that bastardizing the standard and using TPE2 is the right
approach here.  I don't know what other players have made it "the de
facto standard" (if you say iTunes or WMP your point is invalid, since
both are well known for doing whatever they feel like with tags,
including writing broken ones).  Why shouldn't the album artist go in
TCOM (Composer)?  Or how about TOPE (Original artist(s)/performer(s))?
Using TPE2 (Band/orchestra/accompaniment) takes up a slot that is better
used elsewhere.  Think about this for instance:

Album: Crazy Techno vol 2
Album Artist: Ministry of Sound
Artist: TechnoDude
Track Title: Blowing Your Mind
Featuring: John Blaze

This isn't a far-fetched example by any means -- in fact, it's quite
common -- but clearly "John Blaze" belongs in TPE2, not "Ministry of
Sound".  So where do you put "John Blaze" if you've filled TPE2 with
"Ministry of Sound"?  Will anyone show it if you put it in TCOM or TOPE?

There is only one purely cross-player solution to the Album Artist
problem in ID3, which is, don't do it.  ID3 sucks, but the right way to
fix it is to form an industry group to hammer out a newer version that
fixes these problems.  Using TPE2 is not a standard, and can clearly be
shown to cause problems, as in the above example.  Sure, you can get
around this (maybe by writing a TXXX (User defined text information
frame) with the player's name and tag type, but then you run into
cross-player problems (iTunes does a lot of this, btw).  Some players
barge ahead and assume that they're the only one you'll ever want to use
so they can muck up your tags however they like -- this sucks, and I
don't think we should do it.

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.

--Jeff

*You may argue that it's not standards compliant because it's putting
more information than the exact title of the track into the title frame.
 As most compilation/various artists CDs list the artist of the track
along with the title (for instance, on the back of the CD), I don't have
a problem considering all of that grouped information to be a part of
the title.

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