I agree with a lot of your synopsis post... Phil Leigh;601568 Wrote: > IN the real world there is no such attribute as "album artist", as > discussed in most of this thread. ... apart from this bit ;-) There is a real-world attribute "album artist" - it's the name that appears on the spine of a CD case: "<album> by <artist>". That may be "Greatest Hits" by "The Pretenders". "The Pretenders" isn't the artist on every song, but the release is certainly associated to them.
> There is an engineered attribute which was historically used to guide a > record shop owner as to where physically to stock/display an album in > their shop (or list it in their catalogues!). > This attribute was engineered specifically to get round the (otherwise > intractible) 1:M problem of album:song/track artists. Maybe, but I'd say that was the real world, as it really happens ;-) > Do we need it at all? Yes, unless it can be guaranteed that all album names in every music collection will be unique. NB. a (rubbish) alternative solution may be to put the album artist name within the album title. eg. "Queen Greatest Hits", "Squeeze Greatest Hits", "Pretenders Greatest Hits", instead of "Greatest Hits" by "The Pretenders". Note that the Pretenders Greatest Hits is an interesting case - it contains a song by UB40 that includes Chrissie Hynes, the lead singer of the Pretenders. i.e. I don't think that it's even considered to be a Pretenders song with a guest artist - rather the other way round. Of course, this isn't as good for ordering a list of albums, or listing/searching for artist works. > Does anyone ever want to SEARCH (not browse) for "various artists" > albums? Probably not search for "Various Artists" artist name. Maybe someone will search for "Ambient Collective Volume 1", which is a compilation album. But I see no reason to restrict searching/browsing. > Finally, we need a better way of modelling the contributor roles for a > song/track, Yes, the Artist / Track Artist situation is a bit strange, and causes annoyances. Artists on a song/track are always that they are a performer (in some form) on the song. They should all be modelled as Track Artists, but I think it's modelled the way it is for performance reasons, and to avoid recalculating what gets displayed in an artist list dependent on pref settings. > and we need to stop denormalising track attributes (primary artists, > secondary artists, composer etc) into being album attributes). I don't think they are considered as album attributes? I think the UI can show a list of artists, composers, conductors, etc, at album context, but that would come from inspection of the songs. One particular thing that bothers me, is the album year. To me, I tag songs with the year the song was initially released. So for "Greatest Hits" albums, or compilations, re-releases, etc, I tag each song accordingly. This is more useful if I want to play music from a particular time period. Otherwise if a guest looks for music released in 2010, he may find an album containing songs from the 60's. So, for normal albums, often all songs share the same year of release, and the album is displayed associated with that year. It's not the year the album was released. For a compilation or greatest hits album, it may appear associated with multiple years. It would be nice to model album release year, but I would say that is not derivable / is different to the song year tag. > AS for the whole comp detection thing... > IMO SBS should apply the logic that an album is a comp if there is more > than one "primary" artist across the album tracks. > Yes. > SO: "See my friends" by Ray Davies et al or Supernatural by Santana are > NOT comps, but Raising Sand is IF you say it has 2 primary artists > "Robert Plant" & "Alison Krauss" or isn't if you say the artist is > "Robert Plant & Alison Krauss". > Disagree with this. If every track is by "Robert Plant" & "Alison Krauss", or every track is by "Robert Plant & Alison Krauss", then the album is not a compilation. If some tracks are by Robert Plant, and some tracks are by Alison Krauss, then it would be a compilation album (unless tagged to say otherwise). -- Philip Meyer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Philip Meyer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=95 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84475 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list beta@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
