Give me your tired, your hungry, your Various Artists

[Jeff Mitchell]

Hello Amarok users,

Various Artists is one of those things that many people use, and few
people like. I won't go into the nasty details, but the overarching
reason why it sucks (but sucks much less in Amarok than a lot of other
players) is that since there is no standard way to indicate album
consistency with various artists, you have to fall back on a lot of
heuristics -- and heuristics break. We've spent a lot of time on working
on those (hence why it sucks less than other players), but frankly, we
can do better.

Most of you probably know about AFT. (If not, go look at my blog posts,
and/or look up AFT on the Amarok wiki.) I'd like to apply the same
concept to albums, which means that we'll have heuristics for when we
have to make guesses, but when either MusicBrainz tags or our special
tags (using a modified amarok_afttagger) are present to identify albums,
we should be able to do some very good correlation of songs to albums
even when the artist is different.

So here's what I want from *YOU*.

Send me examples of how Various Artists breaks. It's impossible for me
to tell if I'm making things better unless I know how to break it in the
first place (and believe it or not, I don't really know since I tend to
mend my tags to avoid the problem in the first place).

Please be precise, detailed, and keep the example to a minimal set of
tracks possible. In other words, make it easily reproducible, and tell
me *exactly* *how* to reproduce it.

I will try to ensure that when I'm done with my fiddling that all of
these problematic cases are solved*.

Amarok. Working hard to make your music experience better(TM)

--Jeff


* Although as mentioned, any solution is going to require you to embed
identifiers in your tags using either picard or amarok_afttagger.

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