Bugzilla – Bug 1921
Browsing artists should have option to exclude artists who only appear as various artists
Last modified: 2008-09-15 14:36:01 UTC
The new feature to lump various artist albums together and display them under a common various artists artist is GREAT. Much appreciated! Would love to see the ability to exclude artists from the artist list that do not have albums of their own (i.e. artists that appear only on the various artist albums). This would make the browse artist list so much shorter for me (almost 1/2 as big!). I would definitely like to still be able to search for those artists though and get all of their tracks.
Ben - use the 'Composer, Band and Orchestra in Artists' toggle in Settings -> Behavior
I don't get how this resolves my request -- I don't want to add new items to the browse artist list (items from composer, band or orchestra tags). I want to remove artists who only appear in various-artist albums. I already have my setting to "Don't include composer...". Can you explain what I'm missing?
Allow me to put it another way. Currently I can get to various artist album tracks in "browse artist" mode in two ways. One way is Browse Artist -> Various Artists -> Album -> Tracks -- another way is Browse Artist -> [Specific Artist From Various Artist Album] -> Album -> Tracks. I'd prefer it if this second class of navigation to be there. It would be similar to just rewriting all of the artist tags for the tracks to be "various artists" but I don't want to lose the metainfo about the track.
this bug is very similar to bug 38. we could reopen that one or reopen this one but the net effect is the same.
It looks as if this requested functionality has now been implemented (it's present in R3878). I don't believe this should be turned on by default, however, as it removes SlimServer's great ability to let you discover artists in your collection that you didn't know you had. When the functionality is enabled, it would be good to have two options to browse artists by: Browse Album Artists (excluding artists only present in various artist albums) and Browse All Artists (what it says on the tin). In addition, if an artist is included in the Browse Album Artists list, the albums listed beneath them should include the various artist albums on which they are present - these are currently excluded, which seems wrong to me. See http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=47385 for some discussion on this.
The functionality may be there and working for some, but not for me. This is why I opened the bug. I'll keep reiterating -- I get the Various Artist albums listed under Browse Artists -> Various Artists but I do not see a reduction in overall artist count under Browse Artist which is what I would like to see. Maybe it has something to do with my tags? I've got all MP3 w/ID3v2 tags. Max, I'd recommend you file a new enhancement request to contain your suggestion for multiple browse by artist options -- I'd prefer not to have this bug hijacked and you have a better chance of getting your request implemented if it's well-described in the summary.
OK after discovering how this is supposed to work (see Dan's post on the developers list) I added TPE2 tags to all of my various artist tags and DISABLED the automatic detection of VA albums. It works, works great in fact. I'm down to 325 artists rather than 800+. Hallelujah. I'm closing this bug (my bug) as "invalid" because I simply wasn't aware of the requirements. If I have specific feature requests I will file a new bug to house it.