Bugzilla – Bug 10259
Album titles are not unique enough for favorites
Last modified: 2012-02-18 19:51:04 UTC
When an album is added to Favorites, SC stores the album name as an identifier, rather than the internal album id. If the album title is not unique, eg a "Greatest Hits" album, there's a good chance you won't get what you expect when you try to play that favorite back. The effect on favorite albums can change over time when you scan new albums in. Favorites used to reference the unique album id, but this was changed at some point to use album title. I guess this was done, as a complete clear and rescan would result in new identifiers (eg. an album id), so favorites would be incorrect or lost when a full rescan is performed. The same issue can occur with artist names - there could be two artists with the same name. eg. "Blue October" is a Rock band from USA, but a UK band exists as the same name. "Nirvana" was another example. So you can't necessarily assume an artist name as a unique identifier for a Favorite too. It's less likely that two bands that share the same name also share the same album title, and that a user would want to set one as a favorite. I think therefore that the album artist name and the album name need to be referenced in the favorite to uniquely identify an album favorite.
Not even using artist+album name may uniquely identify a single album, in that there can be several albums with the same name by "Various Artists". It would be a good step in the right direction though, and would work correctly for the vast majority of albums. Also, as stated, an artist name may not be unique, so setting an artist as a favorite could result in the incorrect artist being selected from the favorite. Potentially if there were still non-unique items found for the favorite, it should play/browse all matching artists/albums.
Brandon: would this fall under the new schema work?
*** Bug 10417 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is not a new schema bug. There must be smarter ways to identify albums other than by name only. What about storing the URL of the first track on the album, then retrieving the track in the database to find the album?
Alan, i thought this might be inside the scope of onebrowser
The thing about onebrowser is that it cannot instantly fix a lot of bad (or never fully resolved) design decisions.
A fix would be greatly appreciated. Is it a huge change to include an additional identifier?
*** Bug 16831 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Peter Gabriel has several different albums all named Peter Gabriel, as an example. why not the make use of the greatest hits logic, and also reference directory location? surely that would then be unique enough?