I think SlimServer/SqueezeCenter makes a good job of guessing when albums are compilations. Or at least it used to; just recently a change was made in SC 7.1 that affected the logic, which for me at least seemed to make things worse.
I had to set COMPILATION=1 for all songs on all compilation albums in SC7.1 to get my library to work the same as 7.0.1. I'm not sure what was changed to cause that. Michael Herger I think did the change, so perhaps he can explain more. I think the scanner generally does something like the following: 1. if there is a compilation tag (I think there's several different tags it looks for, eg. I think iTunes uses it's own custom tag, something like Txxx ITUNESCOMPILATION), SqueezeCenter reads this and doesn't use it's own guessing logic. 2. If an album has songs by different main performing artists, and an album artist tag is not set, SqueezeCenter will guess that the album is a compilation album. This seems quite logical to me. The key to success is to set album artist tags such that guest performers don't cause an album to become a compilation album. I don't have a problem either with the need to set compilation tags to either 1 or 0 to get the album detected correctly. I find I have to do this anyway in iTunes, as iTunes doesn't guess at all. One improvement to the guessing logic would be to say that if an artist always appears on all songs on an album, then that is the album artist (if an overriding album artist tag has not already been set). i.e. if a song has an additional guest artist, that shouldn't cause it to be a compilation album. I think there were complications due to the ways that people set up their folder structure that stores the source music files. To overcome the "Greatest Hits" problem, it used to assume songs in the same source folder with the same album name are part of that album, whereas songs in the different folder with the same name are another album with the same name. iTunes however by default stores songs under a strict artist/album/song heirarchy, including for compilation albums. I think this is why some people pre 7.1 had to specifically set a COMPILATION=1 tag, to force the songs to be considered part of the same compilation album, otherwise there would be lots of albums with the same album name containing one song. I could be wrong; as I don't use iTunes in that mode. I think an issue now is that even if an album artist exists for an album, SqueezeCenter still tries to set compilation to either true or false. I think that if an album artist is set, SqueezeCenter should assume that it's not a compilation. I believe I had to set COMPILATION=0 for some albums that had an album artist, otherwise it lists all track artists instead of the album artist when browsing albums. -- Philip Meyer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Philip Meyer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=95 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=47297 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
