On Wed, 2001-10-17 at 06:59, Robert Hart wrote: 
> So the question I am asking is how should we handle compilation disks?
> 
> One obvious idea, is to use the Album.Artist for the primary artist or a
> 'meta-artist' such as "Compilation" or NULL, and Track.Artist for the
> actual artist. Album.pl should then be update to show both Albums by an
> artist, and Tracks by that Artist that aren't on Albums by that artist.

Yup, that is the way that I did it over at MusicBrainz. I do like your
approach of having the album artist indicate the compilation artist. 

> (I guess some of the admin pages might need fixing (e.g. movealbum.pl)) 

Yeah. Plus a bunch of new ones need to be created. Convert to multiple
artist, convert to single artist, and change track artist.

> Of course this just looks for Album names that occur more than once, so it
> indiscriminately finds both of the above categories, and albums that just
> happen to have the same name (In particularly "Gold", "The Very Best Of",
> "Greatest Hits", etc.). Although it would be possible to use some
> heuristics  to improve this, I think that some user intervention will
> always be necessary, particularly where the MP3 collection does not
> contain whole albums (e.g. if you have all of "Carpenters - Gold", but
> only one track from "Abba - Gold", it will look like Abba were a guest on
> the Carpenters album).

I'm not sure how well automated methods like that will work. Music
metadata is turning out to be horribly consistent. However...
 
> Any thoughts?

Too many, as usual. For those of you who don't know what MusicBrainz is,
please take a moment to visit http://www.musicbrainz.org . In a
nutshell, MusicBrainz is an open music metadata database. Think CDDB,
but for Audio CDs and MP3 while keeping it open source and open data.

I've tackled (or am tackling now) the problems for how to maintain and
edit metadata on a large scale. Multiple artist albums and the
moderation thereof has already been implemented in MusicBrainz.

So, if we wanted to implement these features we may want to consider
stealing some perl modules from MusicBrainz to make this task easier and
to improve the abstraction layers in Obs.

Also, shortly I will be writing scripts for Obs that will access
MusicBrainz and update/exchange metadata with the server. If enough
people use the system and enter their metadata then people should be
able to have MusicBrainz update a good chunk of their metadata
automatically. Wouldn't that be nice. :-)

-- 

--ruaok         Freezerburn! All else is only icing. -- Soul Coughing

Robert Kaye   --    [EMAIL PROTECTED]   --   http://www.mayhem-chaos.net

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