Philip Meyer;600127 Wrote: > Well, by definition, if you don't have an compilation tag and have > defined an album artist tag, the album isn't a compilation.
Not really 'by definition', more like 'by implementation'. I recently got a Sansa Fuze portable Mp3 player and loaded Rockbox on it. Its database handling is simplistic, but it does one thing that has made me think about SbS fairly complicated handling of compilations. You can browse 'Album Artists' as well as 'Artists'. It doesn't recognize compilation albums as being any different than any other album. If you give all compilations an album artist of "Various Artists" (or, in my case "_Various Artists" to keep them at the top of the artist list), then that's where you'll find your compilations. What's also nice about being able to browse Album Artists is that you don't have to fiddle with library settings of "Group compilation albums together". You can either browse Artists, which includes all the VA/track artists, or browse Album Artists. I haven't experimented with it very much, though. Since I tag every album with an ALBUMARTIST it works very well for me. I'm not sure what would happen if simple, single artist albums had no ALBUMARTIST. I suspect that those artists would not show up in the 'Album Artists' list. What I've done when I transcoded my Flac library to Mp3 is add an ALBUMARTIST=_Various Artists to every compilation, whereas its best to leave these out of any VA album used with SbS. I'm a little torn about whether or not this would be an improvement for SbS. For one thing, it might force you to add ALBUMARTIST tags to every album, which is not common, in order to use this browse mode. Also, Rockbox can't sort albums by artist, so I'm not sure what it would end up looking like in SbS. (We've all seen SbS bugs where the album was sorted by one of the track artists in a compilation.) Sorting by album artist would solve it, but again might force you to add that tag to get the functionality. One solution in SbS, since it has the concept of contributor 'roles' would be to assign one or more artists as album artist to every album that doesn't have an explicit ALBUMARTIST tag. If every track on an album has 'Jackson Browne' as an ARTIST, then he also becomes an album artist. In the end all that might do is move the complexity away from detecting compilations to detecting album artists, and really isn't much different. Still, I really like being able to have the flexibility of either browsing Album Artists or Artists rather than having it one way or the other due to a poorly understood and difficult to implement configuration setting. -- JJZolx ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84475 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
