Here's all of the answers, in short, long, extra-long, and way-too-long formats, so just read as far as you like depending on how much information you want. Trust me, the length of this post is nothing compared to the average length of any thread on this topic.
HOW DO I JUST MAKE IT WORK? This is easy. If SqueezeCenter (SC) sees that an album doesn't have the same ARTIST tags on all of its tracks, it assumes that the album is a compilation. This is a reasonable assumption, but it's not always correct--differing ARTIST tags could merely be caused by guest artists. If you set an ALBUMARTIST tag to the same value on all of the tracks, SC will no longer think it's a compilation and that's the artist that the album will appear under. If you want it to appear under that artist AND under Various Artists, you'll also need to set the COMPILATION tag to 1. Remember that any time you change tags, you'll need to rescan your music before SC will see the difference. WHY DID SC DO THIS? In situations where there simply isn't enough information in the tags for SC to be certain whether or not something is a compilation, it falls back to an imperfect "guessing" algorithm. To understand why music might not be adequately tagged, and how the guessing algorithm still manages to be almost always right, you'll need to understand the two main "eras" of tagging, which I'll call archaic and modern. Archaic tagging was done before the ALBUMARTIST or COMPILATION tags were widely supported, and people typically worked around these limitations by simply removing all guest artist information (i.e. mistagging). Modern tagging includes both ALBUMARTIST and COMPILATION tags, and these two tags allow you to tag the full range of compilation possibilities without having to mistag your music. SqueezeCenter's compilation detection works perfectly under both of the above scenarios, which comprise most, but not all, of the music out there. The largest scenario under which SC fails is music which is tagged using the archaic standards (sometimes done for compatibility reasons), but without the workarounds typically employed at the time those standards were in widespread use. IS IT POSSIBLE TO IMPROVE SC SO THAT THIS WOULD HAVE "JUST WORKED"? For any one particular case, yes--but every proposed solution creates problems larger than the one it solves. For example, if your ARTIST tags didn't match, and SC were changed so that it didn't automatically consider such an album to be a compilation, it would still need to pick one of those ARTIST tags to file the album under. But which one would it pick? If it went by the most frequently appearing tag, this would work for the "one track with a guest artist" scenario, but would break for a "duets album" scenario. It could try to parse the tags for "and", "with", etc, but this would run into problems too numerous to list. Not only this, but ANY solutions along these lines would break any compilation that was tagged according to the archaic standards, and cause SC to misfile all compilations in older collections under one of the artists. WHAT'S WITH THE TROLL? >From what I can tell, he's not entirely a troll. He's a real customer and he really thinks there's a problem here. His music represents another, rarer, type of tagging variation. To understand where he's coming from, you need to know some more history: The MP3 format has always had pretty awful tagging standards, and MP3's transition from archaic to modern tagging was a rough one. MP3 doesn't actually have a real ALBUMARTIST tag, but it has a bunch of other rarely-used tags. So what happened here was that MP3 users commandeered one of the other tags, treated it as if it were an ALBUMARTIST tag, and...with the exception of some griping from a few people who actually used that tag for its original purpose, everything ended up okay. MP3 also doesn't really have a COMPILATION tag. What happened here is that Apple decided to unilaterally fix this shortcoming themselves by inventing a new unofficial tag, and...with the exception of some griping from a few people who didn't like Apple for unrelated reasons, everything ended up okay. Now, at least as far as tagging compilations goes, users of all formats have been able to enjoy the benefits of modern tagging for years. Well, not quite everyone. You see, some software got stuck halfway between archaic and modern. This software may support ALBUMARTIST but not COMPILATION--which gives it enough flexibility to accomodate many more types of collections than the archaic method would allow, but it's still not really capable enough to handle all types of collections. The list of software stuck in this category reads like a list of the also-rans that were crushed by the iTunes steamroller--which may explain why those that are still in business are still holding out against using a tag created by Apple. This guy, who's not really quite a troll, is a devoted user of one of these music managers, and he's pretty bitter that most of the world (including SC, and many non-Apple music managers) embraced a solution that was created by Apple. But that doesn't quite explain it fully. The reason he seems like such a troll is his troll-like "debate" tactics. His signature tactic is the verbal avalanche. He will write so much volume that it's simply impossible to respond to it all. Then, as if he's keeping score, he'll harp that because you didn't respond to point 432 out of 593, that you must therefore have conceded/lost that point. And this is how he "wins" arguments. He'll respond to everything you say, even if his responses make no sense or are unrelated to the topic at hand. By responding, even with a non-sequitur, he considers the point to still be "in play". If you respond to his nonsense, he responds again and again ad nauseum, and when you can no longer figure out why he's still arguing something that all impartial observers would have considered settled at least five pages ago and give up, he declares himself the winner on all points. He'll also engage in personal attacks, and will feign dismay at real or imagined personal attacks against him. If you try to engage him at a rational level, he'll call you irrational--typically with the generous and ironic use of the caps lock key. If you point out bugs in his music manager, he'll say you didn't. Oddly, even if you point out bugs in SC, he'll say you clearly think SC is perfect. This is because he's got an elaborate theory that SC is forcing "their tagging standard" on everyone else, which aside from the obvious inverted causality problem, leads him to think there's a cabal of brainwashed SC disciples working these forums to suppress tagging freedom. And most importantly, he thinks everyone who asks some simple questions about how to tag compilations is validating his struggle against tagging oppression, only to be repeatedly foiled by the aforementioned cabal who have the temerity to simply answer those questions, thus thwarting the glorious revolution for another day. So basically, if this all sounds entertaining to you, boy are you in for a not-so-rare treat. If not, get all the answers you need as quickly as possible before he strikes. Good luck! -- CatBus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CatBus's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7461 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=48072 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
