>Can you give me one realistic example were a user don't want to treat >these albums as compilations ? > There were some examples on the bug report that you attached the patch to.
>- If someone has set ALBUMARTIST=Various Artists, it's pretty obvious >that is has to be a compilation or it is incorrectly tagged and should >have a different artist. > Likely to be a compilation, but not always (see example in comment on bug report). Some users don't want compilations, and have asked for the logic to be turned off completely (I don't agree this is needed either - the presence of album artist tags avoids all compilation scanning logic). i.e. most users fall into one of two categories: 1) don't use album artist tags unless necessary, and have compilation albums auto-detected or explicitly mark them. 2) Use album artist tags for every album, and don't have an interest for compilation indicators. >I think marking these as compilation is a good addition to the auto >detect logic we already have > I think it could add to more confusion; having extra auto-detection logic; it's not going to mark every compilation album as a compilation, because people legitimately can use different album artist names to represent compilations. Ripping using different software, or by picking up different metadata, or by a user manually entering AA tag values, they may have some albums with "VA", "V/A", "Various", "Soundtrack", "Compilation", etc. So, yes, this might turn some albums into compilations - it may not be what the user wants, it might affect browsing if it alters the meaning of artist/track artist roles, and it isn't optional. That said, if it makes some users happy then great - your work is appreciated. I'm not sure it's a great idea to apply to the production source code, that's all. Better solutions must be possible to change the way we think about browsing, to alleviate the underlying issue of non-compilations not appearing within the place where only compilations should appear. >Would be interesting to know how ripping software set it when importing >data from freedb and similar sources, I suspect they also set >ALBUMARTIST="Various Artists" and doesn't set any compilation tag. > I have used various software for ripping, and never end up with album artist tags or compilations. Either not returned from metadata provider, or software doesn't use it, or I've disabled the funtion ;-) >Ok, that might work but it doesn't make sense to me. It's also going to >add even more complexity to the browsing logic then we already have >today > Browse Artists is about browsing a list of artists. However, as it works today, it also has a special item that collects compilations together under a title that isn't really an artist, and internally contains a list of albums that can be by different artists. Surely it is less complex to make the Browse Artists list only actual artists, and not the special case? The special case could still remain untouched; but what follows would be a standard list of all artists, irrespective of whether they are attached as the album artist of a compilation album (remove this bit of logic)? >so I think it's the wrong way to go, at least until someone can >give me a real world sample where an album with ALBUMARTIST="Various >Artists" isn't a compilation. > I have an album called "A Special Tribute To Pink Floyd". Search for it in Google, and you'll find various sites that give info about it. eg. http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,3435587,00.html It's an album where songs are all performed by the same collection of artists. The collection of performing artists don't have a band name, and there are quite a lot of listed performing artists: Robin McAuley, Doug Pinnick, Steve Porcaro, Mike Porcaro, Jason Scheff, Billy Sherwood, Jeff Scott Soto, ... ~30 performing artist names in total. The metadata source that I retrieved the info from (freeDB I think), returned Artist=Various Artists for each song, rather than list ~30 artist names with each song. As every song has the same contributor name, it is not seen as a compilation. And I agree with this - there are various artists performing on each song; but this is in song context - for album context there are not varying artists per song, so it's NOT a compilation. That is how I have decided to tag it, and perhaps other users would tag differently; they may put the name of the lead vocalist as the artist name for each song, or could use the term "Various" instead of "Various Artists" to avoid confusion with the name used for representing compilation album artist names. But I quite like that it reports Various Artists as the track artist when a song is playing on the Now Playing screen, and that if I browse a list of compilation albums, I don't see the album listed because it isn't a compilation. I'm pretty sure I've got a few albums like this. I've got a bunch of live concerts recorded on tape/video that I haven't ripped/transferred to my library yet, where I won't know who the performing artists are, and may tag in a similar way. eg. imagine if the band called "Band Aid" that did "Do They Know It's Christmas" had created an album, and didn't actually have a band name (it does happen with one-off charity collaborations). Each song could be labelled as by "Various Artists" rather than list 30 lead singers from other bands on every song, but the album wouldn't be a compilation as every song would contain "Various Artists" representing the same list of artists. Football teams sometimes used to release such albums too (I haven't got any!) - songs by the team or by chants by football supporters, where no band name is given (could be labelled "No Artist" or "Various Artists", or invent a name such as "Liverpool FC", etc). >Having two entries will just make it more confusing, so I don't like >this. > Some users have requested similar, e.g. at the moment, when browsing albums. Albums can have multiple album artist names, and such albums are only listed once under one arbitrary artist name. Some people would like the albums repeated, once per album artist name. But anyway, that's why I was suggesting to display the "special" entry at the top of the list as another name, such as "Compilations" (either configurable name, or just a localised string), which would contain compilation albums that could appear by differing album artist names ("Various Artists", "V/A", "Various", "No Artist", "Soundtrack", etc). All albums by Various Artists would be found under Artists > Various Artist, all albums by Soundtrack would be found under Artists > Soundtrack. And even better, remove the special item, and put it in a Browse Compilations menu - it's a different collection of things based on a different entity. This is exactly what iTunes does, and I think Foobar (I don't use Foobar as a music library, so I'd have to check). >I'd prefer the separate "Browse Compilations" menu, only changing >"Various Artists" to "Compilations" is going to create confusion among >existing user base. > I think it would reduce confusion, as the pref string representing Various Artists by default is used for two different reasons at the moment. >However, it's important to decide how to handle the "Genres" menu which >also contains a list of artists. I could imagine that there are some >people that don't want the "Genres/Pop" menu to be messed up with a lot >of artists which only are available on compilation albums. > I don't see it being any different. Genres > Rock, currently contains the special Various Artists entry, and then all matching artists. The list is the same - it's just a filtered set of album artists. It could be displayed as Compilations, or remove it (can Browse Compilations, and sort by genre) and albums would appear under each album artist anyway. >> A user today can change the pref setting to "Compilations", but that >> means the scanner could set AlbumArtist=Compilations, which is not good >> for some. It's okay if people always use albumartist tags, because >> they'd never have any compilations (the current suggested work-around >> that some users choose to do). >> >Could you give a real world example where it wouldn't be good if the >scanner set AlbumArtist=Compilations ? > I think setting the pref to "Compilations" such that it appears as "Browse Artists > Compilations" is a good thing, but as the pref is used for two purposes, it would mean that the album artist would be "Compilations", which might not be what the user expects. After all the pref is labelled with "When compilation albums are grouped together, they appear under "Various Artists" by default. You can change that name below." - it doesn't indicate that it will also be used as the default album artist name if an album is auto-detected as a compilation. But any value that the user puts in the setting pref should be honoured. One could always find a reason for a string being a silly value to use, but the rules should be the same - it's just a name (used for two purposes, and with your patch has three purposes). _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
