Oops... Sorry for the first bugzilla-entry (still strugling with the keyboard of
my new macintosh).

I have attached a patch against 5.3.1 that will group all songs in the iTunes
library having the "Compilation" element set to 1 as a "pseudo" artist named
"Compilations". This feature is configurable via the iTunes-Settings-page. 

The advantage of grouping compilations is that your artist list doesn't
"explode" if you have lots of compilations, the disadvantage is that you can no
longer search for a artist from the compilations.

What would be nice is to have the "Compilations" artist at the top of the artist
list (right underneath "All Albums") but since I'm a total SlimServer and Perl
novice I don't know if that is possible.

Can you have a look at the changes and comment or even include in future
versions of SlimServer?

Cheers,

Michel

Created attachment 177 [details]
unified diff

Thanks for the patch.  Doesn't this have the side effect of losing the artist information when looking at 
song info or searching?  Do you think that this is a reasonable tradeoff?

Yes it has this side effect, altough (and I really don't understand why) the
real artists still are visible when browsing albums for some time: If I wipe the
cache and therefore force the iTunes-module to rescan the library, showing
details of a "Compilations" album shows the real artists, but some time later,
only "Compilations" is shown for the artist's names.

For me personally, this tradeoff is acceptable since without this grouping, my
artist-list would become huge (I have a lot of compilations). In the long term,
the SlimServer-DB should support (iTunes)-Compilations so that even if this
grouping is in effect, it would be still possible to search for artists.

With my simple-and-stupid patch chances are high that users will complain that
they can no longer search artists - so from the supporter's point of view i
would not include it in the official SlimServer. 

*** Bug 665 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This is how I currently group my Compilations to avoid having a huge number of
artists from compilation albums:

Index: MP3.pm
===================================================================
--- MP3.pm      (revision 2430)
+++ MP3.pm      (working copy)
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 package Slim::Formats::MP3;
 
-# $Id: MP3.pm,v 1.13 2004/12/07 20:19:52 dsully Exp $
+# $Id$
 
 # SlimServer Copyright (c) 2001-2004 Sean Adams, Slim Devices Inc.
 # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
@@ -32,6 +32,12 @@
        my $tags = MP3::Info::get_mp3tag($fh); 
        my $info = MP3::Info::get_mp3info($fh);
 
+       # Quick and Dirty hack for pseudo compilations support...
+        if ( $file =~ m!/Compilations/! ) {
+               #$tags->{ARTIST}="Compilations";
+               $tags->{ARTIST}=$tags->{ALBUM};
+       }
+
        # we'll always have $info, as it's machine generated.
        if ($tags && $info) {
                %$info = (%$info, %$tags);





I really hope that Slim v6.x will one fine day properly support the compilation
tag. I guess that compilations don't fit in the current DB model :-(

Anyway, I'm resolving this bug (wontfix)

Routine bug db maintenance; removing old versions which cause confusion.  I apologize for the inconvenience.