Thanks for the detailed reply Dean. I'm not sure I'm the best person to advise on how a Compilation/Various Artists scheme should work as I just want the ability not to use these options. My tagging scheme just relies on track, artist, album and genre and I don't want browsing information for these basic fields to be affected by information that happens to be in other fields - such as compilation or composer.
There is also the lowest common denominator consideration. The tags in my music collection are also being used by iTunes, iPod and Music Magic Mixer so I need something pretty simple to work across multiple platforms. This works for me but certainly won't work for everyone hence the pressure to have more sophisticated ways of presenting information. I don't think it is that useful to debate the definition of "compilation". The reality is that iTunes (and probably other ripping programs as well) do tag some - but not all - single artist "Best of..." albums as compilations. We all know that tagging data pulled down from the internet is consistently inconsistent. However this hasn't mattered up to now as Slimserver has ignored the compilation field. In my opinion, the default should still be to ignore the compilation field so the user doesn't see any change to information when browsing and isn't forced to re-tag tracks to keep the same behaviour. If it is optional to do things based on the compilation field then someone who wants to use functionality this will need to tidy up these tags to fix tagging inconsistencies one way or the other. To provide some use cases from my perspective - the majority of my collection would actually be classified as "Various Artists" as it consists of DJ/dance mixes. However having 80% of your albums listed under "Various Artists" isn't a very useful way of finding things. Similarly, having thousands of individual artist names with arcane variations of "x feat. y", "x feat. y (z nighttime remix)", "x feat. y (z daytime remix) isn't very useful either. So what I've done for these albums is to set the track title as "track name - artist" and set the artist title for all tracks as something more descriptive than "Various Artists" such as a combination of the DJ and label. In most cases, iTunes does tag these albums as compilations and when this is set, all tracks are ripped into the same folder rather than lots of individual folders based on the artist name. To be honest, I can't get my head around a Various Artists/Compilation scheme that would work given the various permutations of tags and platforms so personally would prefer to always have the option of "what you see is what you've tagged" based upon track/artist/album/genre without being second guessed what this means based upon information in other fields. I just know that there aren't any artists in my collection called "Various Artists" or any albums with different artist fields on different tracks so it bugs me when "Various Artists" appears :) On a minor point, I use the artist, album and track counts as a quick and easy way of checking if iTunes, Slimserver and MMM are tracking the same music. "Various Artists" is included in the artist count on Slimserver therefore throwing the count out of sync with the other applications -- poneill _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/beta
