>its the rules that are the problem. the reason it is silly, is b/c it >assumes that any album with a single TPE1 mismatch is a VA / comp >album. that is ludicrous. No, it's not ludicrous. The vast majority of albums that have the same artist on every song are not various artist/compilation albums, and the vast majority of albums that have different artists on each track are various artist/compilation albums. I don't think there's any disputing that.
There may be a small number of albums where there are guest performers on some songs. For most people, these extra guest performers do not end up as artist tags, because tools that set the tags when ripping from disk usually don't have that information (just the main album artist as the artist for each track). If you go to the trouble of adding additional guest artist names in the songs, then why not go the extra distance to set a compilation=0 or albumartist tag? >(i admit, i am assuming that last paragraph to be true. am i wrong >about that? if TPE2 is treated as ALBUMARTIST internally by SC, does >that in someway impact if an album is considered a comp or not by SC? >if it does defeat the comp classification to SC, why does my SC still >go thru a "merge VA" process at scan time?) > In my opinion, album artist should prevent an album being classified as a compilation. I can't remember what the SC scanner does; if it is tagging an album as a compilation and there is an album artist defined, then I would raise a bug on that. >how can i tell if SC thinks a given album is a comp or not? > Compilation albums are listed under Browse Artists > Various Artists. Alternatively, navigate to the album in the default skin, and it will say "Compilation: Yes" >(i should also add i don't know if SC has any other VA detection logic. >afaik, it only looks for artist / TPE1 mismatches. but does it have >any other logic? does it look at any strings? folder names or >locations? i don't know). > Not that I'm aware, other than Artist tag mismatches, or TXXX COMPILATION=1 or TXXX ITUNESCOMPILATION=1. >i happen to think the majority of audio users have mp3s, and don't have >any user defined fields. and for identifying comps, afaik, TPE2 is >irrelevant. (afterall, i see that people with explicit album artist >tags still have to use comp tags quite a bit as well) > And I disagree. The majority of popular music albums that exist in the world do not have guest artists, and thus should not have differing primary artist tags on their songs. TPE2, if set, should really prevent an album being a compilation (need to check that). >btw, do you agree with what these guys say here: > >http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=48591 > >b/c if you do, it seems its important to identify if something is a >comp even if ALBUMARTIST sorts it properly. > Yes, if an album is a compilation album, then if I were to print a list of "album by artist", I'd expect the artist to be the album artist. For an album where all songs are by the same artist, the album artist is obviously the same. For an album where songs have different performing artists, but an album artist tag has been set, the album artist is obviously the album artist. For a compilation album (where songs on an album have different performing artists and no album artist tag is set), the album artist should be "Various Artists" (name is configurable via the SC "Music Library" settings page). >in my case, if i turned VA auto detection off, i would then have SC >treat the string "Various Artists" as a string to definitely consider a >comp. > What tag would you put "Various Artists" into. Do you think it would make sense to have a single song with an artist name of "Various Artists"? If you are going to go to the bother of changing your artist tags to say "Various artists" instead of the actual performing artist, then why not instead just add a compilation tag instead? >that kind of "auto-detection" would be head and shoulders above what we >have now. > So instead of looking for COMPILATION=1, it would look for ARTIST="Various Artists"? You really think that's better? _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
