The first slimserver I have used, about 3 years ago, would show all albums with the same name in 'browse albums' ONCE. It would also have artists called 'Various Artists' - which I hated. The fix (then) was to store ALL CDs like /genre/artist/album/song.mp3. Which is what I did, with all 1000 of them.
It makes sense to be able to navigate to a song following a consistent pathname. 'We', linux users, can do 'ls /pop/*/Merry\ Christmas/*.mp3' to find all songs in a compilation. I like that. I *do not* want to move my mp3 files around. The last and the previous releases of Slimserver have an option called 'variousArtistAutoIdentification' which is called "List albums by all artists for that album". It doesn't work for me. That's because I split multi-artist albums into several directories. The description doesn't say that, it just says: "List albums by all artists for that album". No if's, no but's about where my files are. We have numerous "Various Artists' threads that show it's confusing. My opinion is that variousArtistAutoIdentification is broken. Browsing for albums, I get "20 Great Songs of Christmas" 20 times. I know that "Merry Christmas" is an not-so-original name used for both a compilation and some artist, and I understand why the whole directory issue is there. But: I have quite a few compilation albums and they mess up the 'Browse Albums' function. Also, I cannot play a whole compilation without clicking on '+' 20 times. I've tried to go through the *.pm scripts trying to find where this connection between variousArtistAutoIdentification and the file location is made. My knowledge of Perl to too limited - I cannot find it. (I wanted to ditch that file-location piece of code.) So, this is my request: Can we please have an 'variousArtistAreSplit' option that tells slimserver that it should group albums regardless of their location when 'variousArtistAutoIdentification' is on? We could have a warning saying that if two albums are called "Merry Christmas" they will be mentioned ONCE only. I'd prefer that error over the broken 'browse albums' function I've been coping with in the last releases. I think that this proposal might end the "Various Artists" debate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Adriaan van Nijendaal adriaan @ choam.com +32 (0)80 319 913 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
