Give me your tired, your hungry, your Various Artists

[Jeff Mitchell]

On 3/19/2010 10:29 PM, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> 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).

<snip>

(I've snipped the long details out  :-)

Part of what you are describing is how it's stored in the DB and part is
the display in the collection browser. They're separate though related
topics. I'm interested right now in the former, because once the data is
proper in the DB, then you can theoretically display it however you want.

So, what you've done and gone is put your information in the various
album artist tags. I believe this is already used by Amarok (I'll check).

What I'm talking about here is identifying specific albums. So that no
matter what the artist says, track name is, or even if you listed a
different album artist, you could still have it identify as the same album.

I'll have to think how this may, or may not, help out what you want. I'd
be interested if you'd think about how it may affect your use case (or
not) and see what you end up thinking. One of the problems (as you've
seen with your experiences with XBMC and Amarok) is that different
players display different ways because they have different heuristics.
XBMC displays perfectly for how you've done your metadata; Amarok
displays pretty well (but not perfectly) for a wide range of ways of
grouping the files and tagging the tracks.

Another possibility might be to allow you to write, at the same time as
writing an aft album identifier, a flag indicating that an album is a
compilation/various artists. This way you could set the property on the
file (or maybe on the shared album ID) and not have to worry about
losing this information when you do a rescan or if you lose your Amarok
DB. Plus, you could do this in a batch fashion, which is nice.

Anyways, I look forward to your (and others') thoughts.

--Jeff

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok/attachments/20100320/fb157447/attachment.sig>