>this is very interesting to me for many reasons. is what you say above >true? i hope so, b/c its a step in the right direction. > I hope not, because it would be a step in the wrong direction; unnecessary extra logic at scan time, that also enourages bad practice. No other apps that I am aware of have this logic so it's introducing yet another inconsistency; tag metadata sources are not consistent, so some albums could be tagged with "Various", "Various Artists", "VA", etc.
>first, its important to stipulate that all major marketshare apps and >tagging sources (except freedb) will fill in TPE2 (ripped or >autotagged) as meaning AlbumArtist info, comp or not. that means >almost all audio file users will come to slim with that data. (they >also do it for other formats) > It's not important to stipulate, especially when you are wrong. I think it's fairly safe to say that iTunes is one of the major marketshare apps. I just stuck a regular CD in my drive, fetched track details from gracenote, and the Album Artist was blank. The same happens with my ripper of choice, EAC, which is quite popular. Interestingly, dbPowerAmp does (sometimes?) retrieve the irrelevant/unnecessary Album Artist name for regular albums (with all songs by the same artist), but doesn't for compilations, where perhaps it would be more useful! I stuck in a compilation disk, and tried dbPowerAmp - this identified the album as a compilation (sets the compilation tag), and Album Artist was blank. And, as I mentioned above, metadata content is inconsistent across metadata sources, and even within the same metadata source engine there's a lot of inconsistencies. The only way to achieve a good music library, is to tweak tags. You can't assume that an app will have all these special logic checks to cope with various deficiencies in metadata sources. >should not just blanketly design the software on the >assumption that the mere presence of AA info inherently means something >beyond what it is meant to do. > In what way is AA being treated as something beyond what it is meant to do? It's defining the artist that the album belongs to, grouping songs together onto a single album. In my opinion, the purpose of an artist tag is only to define the artist name. It should not assume that certain names means that an album is a compilation or not. >http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8324 > It's not a bug, and to turn off such logic is dangerous. >b/c for many people, being able to turn off VA artist mismatch >detection logic would help speed up the scanning process. > Potentially it could speed up scanning process, but for many users they could end up with a proliferation of albums, because songs would not be grouped correctly, which would slow down the app when browsing. For many users, gathering sub-optimal tagged songs is a life-saver, as the majority of albums with differing artists *are* compilations. For a smaller number of cases where there are guest artists (many metadata sources don't return guest artists anyway), they appear as compilations, but that's better than the songs not appearing within the album (eg. ending up with several albums with sub-sets of the tracks on each album). >what would or should happen if its turned off for those users without >AA info? well, implement it, and lets see what happens, and then go >from there. I see you have this all figured out. Phil _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
