I'm not sure if I'm missing something but isn't the purpose of the
compilation logic in SBS only to automatically set ALBUMARTIST to
"Various Artists" under some circumstances ?
Basically:
- When COMPILATION=1 is set
or
- When no ALBUMARTIST tag exists and there are more than one ARTIST tag
value on the album.
If this is the case, it feels like setting ALBUMARTIST="Various
Artists" should just work, independent of SBS settings.
All the discussions regarding various artists and compilations makes me
feel that something is wrong ? Or is it just that MrSinatra has opposite
ideas compared to everyone else ?
I'm pretty interested in this as a new third party solution a few of us
are working on might result in that you get a lot of extra information
about contributors on a track. For example information about musicians,
producers, opera actors and similar things and I feel we really need a
better solution than we have today because else the artist list are
going to get very long.
I also think the problem is related to if you typically listen to
individual tracks or complete albums. If you are typically listening to
complete albums, you probably have pretty few compilation albums, and
it's very logical to hide all compilations under "Various Artists". If
you are typically listening to individual tracks, you really want to
complete list of artists and in this case the "Various Artists"
grouping gets pretty uninteresting.
I think the main issue at the moment is to make system work good for
people with a lot of compilation albums that mainly listens to albums.
For these people, the "Various Artists" album list gets too long and
it's hard to find things and they probably don't want all artists in
the main artists list because that will make that too long. The optimal
solution would be to separate "All Artists" and "Album Artists" into two
separate menus but as mentioned elsewhere this could get complex as the
artist list also exists in other places, for example under the "Genres"
menu.
To me personally, it feels bad to be forced to set things like "Various
Jazz Artists" and "Various Pop Artists" in the ALBUMARTIST tag to make
the system work for people with a lot of compilation albums, especially
as it's hard to know the values in advance. Most people probably realize
they will need a separation into multiple "Various Artists" segments
after a while and are then forced to re-tag their music files.
Maybe we need a "Artists/Various Artists" menu where you have to select
a individual artist first and then are able to select album ?
Basically having a structure like:
Artists/Various Artists/<artist>/<album>
Instead of the current model:
Artists/Various Artists/<album>
However, with only about 30 compilation albums in my complete
collection I'm afraid I don't experience all the issues myself. Would
be interesting to hear from someone who have a lot of compilation
albums and how he/she typically browse to find a specific compilation
album to listen to.
--
erland
Erland Isaksson ('My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info))
(Developer of 'many plugins/applets'
(http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/User:Erland). If my answer
helped you and you like to encourage future presence on this forum
and/or third party plugin/applet development, 'donations are always
appreciated' (http://erland.isaksson.info/donate))
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