Hi,

Ever since starting using Obs, I have been thinking about how to make Obs
handle CDs with tracks by more than one artists.

In my CD collection these discs fall into two categories. 

1) CDs that are primarily one artist, but have one or more guest. e.g.
(Sailing to Philadelphia by Mark Knopfler, has one track featuring James
Taylor)

2) CDs that are a complete mixture of artists. (e.g. The Best Seventies
Album In The World ...Ever (2)).

Currently there is no way at all (that I can see) of viewing, or adding
these discs as a whole.

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.

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

If we wish to, I think we can automagically identify possible compilations
fairly easily, using a query such as:

SELECT name, count(Album.name) AS number FROM Album GROUP BY Album.name
HAVING number>1;

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).

Any thoughts?

Rob

p.s. It's interesting to note that although I have 645 rows in my
obs.Album table, there are only 210 unique names, and that only 39 of 
those are duplicated.


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