Bugzilla – Bug 288
Listing compilation discs under "Various Artists"
Last modified: 2008-10-02 14:57:11 UTC
I have around 75 compilation albums (2 10-disc classical sets and 50 or so movie soundtracks), which has increased my Artists list to well over 1000. You can imagine how painful it is to try and browse through artists using the remote control! I would love to be able to somehow filter these into a "Various Artists" group so they do not clutter up the artist list.
Absolutely correct - this a major headache, and one that needs addressing as a priority. I have many dozen compilations, and using the superb jriver product, Media Centre, it assigns - in its viewer (not in the tags) any album with multiple artists as a "Multiple Artist" album ie. Various Artists. To fully understand how good this feature is, you should try jriver. However, this methodology does not translate into Slim Server. CDDB / Gracenote presents artist info for various artist albums in such as way that programs like Media Centre can handle. With 10 minutes of recoding on Slim Server, a rule can be put in that simply says - if multiple artists are detected in the same album folder, then list them under Various Arists as the header artist in the top list.
This will be fixed in the new backend database.
This database upgrade was mentioned ages ago, but I can't see any resolution to it. Currently, I am moving Various Artists to a different directory awaiting the bug fix, and I just don't see how people can be using Slim Devices with this bug unresolved. Given that all CDDB/Gracenote services offer various artist albums as multiple artist names, and Slim Devices has a ripping service which I'm sure is offering the same naming scheme. It just doesn't make sense. Friday night vent over. Any news ? Love to know !
I would add that instead of just being called "various artists" you could choose to list the album by name, and have it appear in the "browse artists" view - which is where most of us go to find our music. e.g. "the rushmore soundtrack" would appear next to "rush" in an artists list. the individual artists should still be searchable by the "search artist" module. i would like to avoid having an artist, with 1 album, and 1 song taking up space in my artists view.
I would also prefer it if artists on Various Artist albums were not listed under Browse Artists. I suppose though that this needs to be some kind of configurable option, as some people won't want that effect, whilst others may want it to work in a different way. Eg. I don't like the idea of listing the various artist album name in the Browse Artists list - if I want to find an album I use the Browse Albums facility instead. Similarly, I'd like Browse Albums to only list full albums - if I'd ripped only a couple of tracks from an album, for example. However I'm not sure how slimserver could work out what albums are full or partial.
I'd like to see this feature be made even more general, so the sorting criterion is independent of the artist name that gets displayed. For example, I'd like to be able to list artists alphabetically by last name (e.g., David Bowie would come between Beck and The Byrds, instead of between Danzig and Devo) without having to put "Bowie, David" in the ID3 tag (which, in my opinion, is just ugly). Adding the first name to the "ignore" list doesn't work, because if you add "James" for James Brown, what happens to the band James?
To recap (and thanks for Slim Devices for informing me that this is currently being worked on for version 6.1 inclusion) 1) If an album in a directory has more than one artist showing, then assume its a "Various Artists" album 2) Gracenote and other online databases list various artists in a listing, and Slim Server has no way of dealing with it. 3) JRiver's Media Centre is a great example of a very well tried and tested solution, and that product - like Slim Devices - is very much user feedback driven. 4) Media Centre and Slim Server should be the same - that is - if the folder has more than one artist, then show it as xxxxxxx where xxxxxxx is a field in the configuration system for Slim Server. It will allow users to define what it is called. For example, Various Arists, Compilation, (Various) etc.... 5) Media Centre does NOT retag data. You can view a tree of artist/album which would show ACTUAL data (as Slim Server does now) or artist(auto)/album which automatically reshuffles data in the tree in line with various rules - such as the various artists rule. I hope this helps.
any news on this?
dan has a patch nearly done for this.
Sorry all - this is too big of a change to make it into 6.1.
I too would like a reduced artist list, but for my library a slightly different solution would work better. For each track I have an ARTIST and an ALBUMARTIST tag (sometimes more than one of each, but let's call it one for now). Compilations are tagged with "Various Artists" in the ALBUMARTIST field. A nominally single-artist album containing a duet (for example, "featuring X" on the album sleeve) would mention both performers as ARTIST for one track, and ALBUMARTIST will contain the main performer. (So "Rattle And Hum" has ALBUMARTIST=U2, but one track has ARTIST=U2 and ARTIST=BB King.) With such a metadata setup (granted, not everybody has this), the ideal solution would be a "Browse by album artist" and "Browse by song artist" (perhaps with less confusing labels). I'd imagine that the earlier suggestions for VA-specific behaviour could be triggered through a pseudo-ALBUMARTIST tag, filled in with "Various Artists" automatically (in the database, not the files) if no explicit ALBUMARTIST is present and other VA rules apply.
I've added this feature as part of the 6.2/trunk tree - subversion change 3849. Please see the link for details & file any future enhancements as a new bug. Thanks.