>Do you know what weird effects COMPILATION=0 causes ? You'd think it would be the same as having no compilation tag, but I think the presence of the tag changes song artists from having artist contributor role to track artist contributor roles. [I can't really remember - but when I was messing about last year I discovered differences in how the scanner stored tracks].
Also, it causes songs with varying artists on the same artist name in the same source folder to be split up such that there would be an album per song track artists combination. i.e. if there were two albums called "greatest hits" by different bands in the same folder, this would be seen by SBS scanner as a single album, and be a compilation by Various Artists by default. If COMPILATION=0 is added to the songs, then I believe this will split the album into two; one for each artist. This is a good thing; but can have undesirable effects if applied to an album that is a compilation. I think when songs on an album have been split into source tree structure artist/album paths (iTunes ripper does this by default), COMPILATION tag is required to join tracks together, otherwise they are treated as different albums (the "Greatest Hits" issue avoidance technique used by the SBS scanner). There may be issues if COMPILATION=0 (can't remember now >I assume COMPILATION=0 is the only situation which results in >albums.compilation=0 in the database ? > Yes. >For which file format does iTunes produce COMPILATION=1 ? >I though it just set the unofficial iTunes specific TCMP frame, but >maybe that's only for MP3 files. Sorry. When I was mentioning COMPILATION tag, I mean logically the compilation tag, not the physical representation. iTunes uses TCMP in id3 tags. iTunes supports compilation tags in AAC files. Not sure how that it physically represented. >It's not doing any extra queries nor any extra loops, it's just an if >statement that decides what it should store in albums.compilation, so >I'd be surprised if it had any visible effect on performance. > okay. >3. >Make a bit larger fix that will affect menu structures in the user >interface and "correct" the Artists menu so it doesn't look at the >compilation flag at all and instead just look at the artist roles. >Basically start treating the "Various Artists" entry the same way as > "Various Artists" is just a normal contributor record, linked as the album artist for some albums, just like any other contributor record. To make all artists' albums appear under the artist name, irrespective of compilation status sounds like an easy fix. To also include the unchanged behaviour of the current special "Various Artists" entry (dependent on pref setting) that only lists compilations, irrespective of album artist name, would solve the issue for everyone without losing any current capability or control, with I believe minimal changes. There currently already exists two "Various Artists" entries in the Artists list (special one at the top of every page, and normal artist entry sorted within "V"). A small cosmetic change to set this special label to have square brackets around it (i.e. appear as "[Various Artists]") to show the difference would be good. Also something beginning with "[" naturally sorts to the top of the list, so it would look less odd anyway. _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
