I want to try to answer Michael's question: *the goal is to establish at least two modes for browsing artists, one purposely brief, the other more exhaustive/specific.*
the way I would do it would be to have the brief mode based on "album artist" values alone. while everything presented to server won't necessarily have explicit albumartist tags, server should assign an albumartist value for everything, one way or the other, which I believe it does currently do, (correct?) so that mode is intuitive and easy to understand to the user as it mimics the marketplace, and its likely to be shorter than the second mode. I would purposely call it: Home > Album Artists as that is now standard in just about every app out there, including iTunes. the second mode would initially, by default, only have "artists" but it would be configurable. I would call it: Home > Artists I don't like the term "track artist" but that's what I am talking about here. artist is the actual artist[s] listed on a given track, and very often is more detailed and explicit than the album artist value. in id3v2, this is the TPE1 value, but each standard of any consequence has its way of listing [track] artist vs album artist. I would then allow in prefs the user to check whatever combo of values they want this list to include. artists would be checked by default. a user could then add composers, conductors, band, albumartists, and so on. whatever they wanted as long as at least one was checked. to eliminate dupes, server would then merge any matching values in order to create the "result set" that the prefs picked then generated for display. I think that is very reasonable and straight forward and totally in line with how other apps present data and allow browsing. I also don't think it will require you to reinvent the wheel, it shouldn't be too far a stretch from what you already have. you could also have a separate pref to allow users to rename Home > Artists to something else, like Home > Contributors if they wanted. in addition, I would also create a: Home > Comps category and just provide a simple link to it (for both suggestions above) from where VA links exist now in the current artist list. the reason being that it will allow you to remove all the code concerned with figuring out what is or isn't a comp when creating any of the artist lists above, since that absolutely should have no bearing whatsoever on creating those lists. that will result in better performance and have other benefits, as described by Phil, as well as eliminate some current bugs. and it would also be nice to have a single place to browse all your compilations together even if they have many differing explicit album artist values, as mine do. I hope this will actually happen. its long overdue. surely there is no harm in putting the above into a beta release and letting us test it out and see if we like it? Using: Win7 64 and LMS 7.8 & Duet with ipads and the logitech app, and ipeng on an ipod ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BJW's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=58242 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101264 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
