It seems that since 1.4 or so the artist listing became case sensitive. (if album listing is case-sensitive, that is problematic as well, haven't checked)
I'm really not looking forward to going through my collection to find all the artists that are listed n number of times because there is some slight case discrepancy in the names. Is there any way to turn this "feature" off?

No way, really?

Dude, clean up your tags...it's that easy!

I have, I don't know, closer to a thousand albums in my mp3 dir. A couple of hundred artists I'm sure at least. I'm trying to see the benefit/nuisance balance here, and I don't see why anyone would want the listings case sensitive. I do however see that it is a nuisance: any new user will have to go through their possibly quite extensive collection editing tags, also making sure to edit the tags for any files they get in the future, so they conform to the arbitrary standard. What is the benefit here?

The main reason is that many people take pride in an orderly collection - that's why they USE a collection-based player in the first place. If you don't care about tags, then Amarok probably isn't the player for you.

And seriously, it's not THAT difficult to fix tags. Knowing they're wrong is half the incentive.

Another reason would be an example I can give you from my own collection - there's a trance outfit called Mindfield, and a **** metal band called MINDfield. Personally, I wouldn't want any nasty surprises to arise when I'm listening to Mindfield and some of my partner's MINDfield slips into the playlist. Having case sensitivity is the best way to tell them apart.

Well, I just spent about an hour manually editing the artist and album tags for case. Still not convinced I should have had to.

dangle_wtf wrote:The main reason is that many people take pride in an orderly collection - that's why they USE a collection-based player in the first place. If you don't care about tags, then Amarok probably isn't the player for you.

And seriously, it's not THAT difficult to fix tags. Knowing they're wrong is half the incentive.

Another reason would be an example I can give you from my own collection - there's a trance outfit called Mindfield, and a **** metal band called MINDfield. Personally, I wouldn't want any nasty surprises to arise when I'm listening to Mindfield and some of my partner's MINDfield slips into the playlist. Having case sensitivity is the best way to tell them apart.

Could be an option though... you know, "Check here to make your collection case insensitive", "Check here to ignore words like 'A' and 'The' at the beginning of artists/songs"

Incidentally, my artists in my collection are sorted as if 'The' weren't there (I forget the term for that kind of alphabetizing), but when I have a bunch of songs in the playlist and I sort by title, 'The' gets stuck in the middle of the 'T's!!  Whichever way is fine by me, I can adjust to use either, but it would be nice to have some conistency throughout the Amarok interface!

I'll second this option, I have over 3000 albums, manually editing that many scares me!

Has this still not being fixed?

I can't even begin to think of manually going through 12,000 songs. This is ridiculous.

People, Unix world IS case-sensitive. And you cannot do anything with it. Just relax and enjoy free software as is. Or make it better! You've got sources, you've got Vi...

Hi,

I just installed AmaroK, and I think too it will be a very good thing to have a "Check here to make your collection case insensitive" option. You will have choice if you want to keep difference between Mindfield and MINDfield, but if you don't need this, you don't have to change tags of your 12,000 songs. I have a lot of doubles in my AmaroK collection (artists and albums) just because of case sensitivity... I don't have time to spend just to change case of albums and artists in my tags. So I think I will no longer use AmaroK. It's really a pity, cause I think this software is good. But I don't have hours to spend just for this problem. Hope this option will be added in the future.
HeadHunter I don't understand your reply. Yes Unix world is case sensitive, but if you do a very simple "grep -i" in your terminal, you will never have case sensitivity problems with your strings...

I'm strongly against this...there's no reason at all why the Amarok devs should do something about it just because lazy users refuse to tag their files properly. Too bad, their fault.

If you add this feature the next request will probably be sth like "hey, why can't I use smart playlists based on the year an album was released? I don't tag my files but Amarok isn't usable like this! it should auto-guess the year of my albums!!1!" or "your album cover feature is broken!! I never tag the album field but shouldn't it work anyway?! please fix this asap!!1!1!!"

GUYS, YOU CAN'T BLAME YOUR PROBLEMS WITH THE COLLECTION VIEW ON ANYONE BUT YOURSELF! THIS FEATURE NEEDS PROPER TAGS AND FIXING YOUR TAGS IS NOT UP TO THE AMAROK PEOPLE TO SOLVE!

SO PLEASE STOP WHINING AND FIX YOUR GODDAMN TAGS! 

Whee! Time to chip in again on this surprisingly contentious issue. (Amarok devs -- is there any point to these threads, or do you ignore them?)

So, first, before someone yells at me about this again: my files are all correctly and consistently tagged, so this entire discussion is entirely academic for me. I only do this because I'm neurotic and obsessive, though, and not because I feel like I should have to do so because my media player demands it. This is ultimately a philosophical question, of course -- you're right that Mindfield and MINDfield are different bands, but so are Nirvana and Nirvana, The Monks and The Monks, Thanatos and Thanatos, The Wailers and The Wailers... My point is that case sensitivity helps sometimes in disambiguating bands, but it's not a perfect solution if that's why you want it.

For some people (Mindfield and MINDfield fans, among others), case sensitivity is useful and serves an important purpose. For a lot of us, it's just a nuisance -- why should someone care if their tags are exactly right, if Amarok can be smart enough to make small fixes for them? I use Amarok to play my music, and the music collection is supposed to be there to make that job easier, not to add extra work (no matter how easy it may be).

(Not to the Amarok devs -- this is not a particularly important issue for me, and I won't be much bothered if you don't change it one way or the other. I just wanted to add my thoughts to the thread. In other words, please don't take this as a complaint about Amarok, which I'm quite happy with.)