Give me your tired, your hungry, your Various Artists

[Colin Guthrie]

Yo,

'Twas brillig, and Jeff Mitchell at 20/03/10 01:46 did gyre and gimble:
> Various Artists is one of those things that many people use, and few
> people like. 

I like Various Artists... i just rarely like media players handling of
them :D

To be fair, Amarok's is pretty good, but I'm pretty anal, so it's not
*perfect* (as you say).

Oddly enough I've just been talking to Leo on IRC today about this
topic. I was trying to write one of my albums to my iPhone which was a
Various Artists album. I was able to hack up support for this, but album
in question isn't your typical VA track, it's a mix album so the "Album
Artist" is quite specific. I'll outline it more below and link to a
patch I have for the collection scanner (that is very much WIP).

> 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).

Well I have some albums that just fall into the basic "VA" case. A bunch
of tracks in an album all with different artists. This works fine with
the current Amarok VA implementation and heuristics.

But I also have a bunch of albums in the "Another Late Night", "Late
Night Tales" and "Back To Mine" series. These are "mix albums" - i.e. a
particular DJ has selected and mixed the tracks. In this case, the
Amarok implementation breaks down.

There are several different "Another Late Night" albums all by different
DJs:
 * Groove Armada/Another Late Night/
 * Kid Loco/Another Late Night/
 * Tommy Guerrero/Another Late Night/
 * Fila Brazillia/Another Late Night/
 * Howie B/Another Late Night/
 * Rae & Christian/Another Late Night/
 * Zero 7/Another Late Night/

Each of the above albums contain several tracks by various different
artists. See:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=another+late+night

In this case, when I'm looking at my collection in the classic,
Artist->Album->Tracks setup, I would like the top level artist to be the
ones listed above. I'd like to go to my Zero 7 entry in the list, expand
it and see "Simple Things" and "Another Late Night" as the albums.

My metadata is very carefully arranged here: I use TPE2 or ALBUMARTIST
to store the "Album Artist".

Not long ago, I stared playing with XBMC (I'm a traditional MythTV user
for the media centre but like to shop around a bit!). I was pretty much
amazed when it scanned my music and presented my various artists tracks
pretty much perfectly! In the classic Artist list, it seemed to create
the first level heirarch via the following:

SELECT DISTINCT IF(""=albumartist, artist, albumartist) AS artist FROM
tracks;

For me, this is perfect :)

> 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 think I've done that above - please shout if you want a more detailed
example.

I do specifically put the phrase "Various Artists" into my TPE2 and
ALBUMARTIST fields when I just want a general purpose VA album. i'd be
happy to ditch this in favour of a compilation flag or even just heuristics.

Other than mix albums, one other place I do specifically use
TPE2/ALBUMARTIST is for "Soundtrack". I don't have too many of these,
but I like to use that term so that all movie sound tracks are grouped
together nicely under the artist "Soundtrack". This is very much an
abuse of the field, but I like the result it produces.


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

Personally, I'd really like to see the "Compilation" and "Album Artist"
fields exposed in the metadata editor. "Compilation" is not really
needed as it's already available via the "Show under Various Artists"
context menu options, but I figure may as well show it.

I really dislike iTunes, but I certianly like that they expose these two
fields in the Metadata editor.


As part of my work to try and get this info synced to the iPhone I had a
bit of a play with the parsing of this field. The collection scanner
already does this, but it never made it into the database via the
ScanResultProcessor :(

I "fixed" this here:
http://gitorious.org/~coling/amarok/colings-amarok/commit/76d4e7246cb708eebb5b8b1d65c9d0c137373260

It may or may not be how you want to do it ultimately but it's there if
you want. I hope this is the way you want to support it ultimately as it
fits in with my personal view :)

The downside of this patch is that it totally breaks the display of the
some of my VA albums as the tracks are now scattered around under their
individual artists. I'd imagine that's simple to fix up again, but I
didn't look at that as at the time I was only interested in getting the
metadata in there so I could pass it across to the iPhone. The rest of
my commits can be found here:
http://gitorious.org/~coling/amarok/colings-amarok/commits/master

It's not perfect yet (and I think there is a bug relating to albumartist
handling in libgpod that I'm speaking to Christophe about), but it's
working OK :)


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

And always appreciated :)

Take care


Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
  Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
  Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]