[obs-dev]Compilation Album Problem

[Heino Walther]

First of all, thanks for the best and most stable Jukebox solution to date! Trust me, I have tested them all, at first they work ok, some of them even have very nice features, but I think that I have the ultimate test system, as I have a collection of over 300 CD-ROM’s filled with MP3 files… (and if I may advertise a bit, www.emusic.com is the future of music distribution)… The reason why all other jukebox systems tends to break down, is that all these CD-ROM’s are located in a CD-ROM Jukebox, that’s a mechanical jukebox with an robotic picker, and 6 CD-ROM drives.  This is controlled by a SUN Solaris box, that quite simply presents a virtual file system with all the CD-ROM’s in it, either via NFS or CIFS (Windoze), it of cause has a caching feature so frequently requested files are located on harddisk.  The generally latency is about 5-10 secs, that is from I request the file, until the first bytes comes though… Very nice system, works very well together with OBS, because it also pre-cache’s the files about to be played, so there is no gab between the different tunes… Other jukebox systems may have something similar, but it just doesn’t work as well, and frankly I cannot understand why, it can’t be that hard to make ? ;-)   Never the less I have a fairly large database now, and a lot of compilations too, and this is the only throne in my eye right now. I’m a bit afraid that the solution to the problem might need a total re-import of the tunes ;-)   One solution to the problem, database wise might be to introduce another Artist “AlbumArtist int(11)” which just points to an artist in the Artist table…   A Compilation Album would then look something like this:   Id                   Name             Artist              AlbumArtist 101                 “Mix 1”            3 (Artist1)        1 (Various Artists) 102                 “Mix 1”            4 (Artist2)        1 (Various Artists) etc…   A normal Album would look like this:   Id                   Name             Artist                                    AlbumArtist 201                 “101”               10 (Depeche Mode)               10 (Depeche Mode)   I realize that this will need some changes in the SQL scripts, and the displaying of the albums…   I cannot see a problem with the SQL side of things, if agreed on this way to do it, I could go though the SQL scripting, and adjust it if you like ?   Also it shouldn’t be a biggie to write a quick Perl script to fill up the AlbumArtist attribute with either “Various Artist” or the Artist name…   Tell me what you think about this solution…   Regards, Heino Walther