Amidst the noise in the now closed "Sort by Album Artist" thread there was some good content. I'll paraphrase some of it, expand on it with my limited knowledge, and hopefully allow the signal to continue.
Premise #1 - Tags, depsite everyone's wish to the contrary, are broken, at least in the sense that their behavior varies by application and they are not used consistently. Premise #2 - SqueezeCenter supports more than one kind of file format and, by extension, more than one kind of tag. To accomplish this, it "normalizes" the tags according to specific rules that have been established over time. Premise #3 - For some set of users, the SqueezeCenter tag normalization is perfect. For some other set of users, it is acceptable. For yet another set, it is unusable. There may be other nuances, but these sets seem adequate to capture the idea. Premise #4 - General adjustments to the way SqueezeCenter normalizes tags will result in changes to the sets described in #3 but will never eliminate the problem that it does not work perfectly (or even acceptably) for everyone. It would simply sort the members into different sets. Now on to the problem... MP3 is the single most-popular file format used for digital music today; sadly, it does not have an AlbumArtist tag. It does have a Band tag (referred to as TPE2). Some, but not all, music library applications use Band as AlbumArtist. If you use one of these applications, you will have a certain expectation of how Band should work. SqueezeCenter is one of the application that does not map Band to AlbumArtist. This is a result of wanting to support as many formats as elegantly as possible, and other tag formats include BOTH Band and AlbumArtist. SqueezeCenter does respect the Band tag, but does not allow a sort on that field. This creates confusion for some users, especially those who use applications that consider Band to be AlbumArtist. These users would like to see Band used the same way the ALBUMARTIST tag is used inside SqueezeCenter. So, how about we continue this dialog as a discussion where you can share your opinions about how we can address the problem of normalizing ALL the different tag formats in a useful way, with an eye not toward solving just your particular individual needs (it's open source, you can do that yourself), but works toward making sets 1 and 2 the most likely result for any given user. Please, chat amongst yourselves (but play nice). -=> Jim -- JimC "well, she wasn't all of that, but she sure was some of that." -- BKlaas' college buddy ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JimC's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9428 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=46093 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
