As above, I'm using a recent SVN build (April 29) on Arch Linux (2.6.29 kernel) and using KDE 4.2.2.

1) Various Artist albums still not working quite right in the collection browser. One album I have (Television's Greatest Hits (70's and 80's) is listed 40 times under 'Various Artists', as I've manually had to 'List Under Various Artists' for each of the tracks which erroneously have appeared under the main collection listed under the track artist.

2) About 90% of the covers under 'Various Artists' category are missing. I have a 'folder.jpg' in each album's folder, and these are correctly displayed under the main collection. I haven't tried a rebuild of the collection recently, but given the time it takes to rebuild 20,000 tracks....

Hope this is of use.

[EDIT] The only two albums under VA that have covers showing is one that I have manually attached a cover to, and the aforementioned album which has been manually added and appeared 40 times (with cover).

Yeah, same here.

I have got...

1) a cover.jpg in *every* album folder
2) an embedded id3 cover art for *every* single song

...in my collection. And yet none of the album covers for various artists albums shows up.

Just wanted weigh in and confirm this bug.

i have a similar problem.
i created an album from different mp3s, tagged it with a single album name (top-tracks) and amarok svn version from today (20090517) does not show that album under various artists. all tracks are shown under their respective artists. even if i manually click on every of the 20+ entries when browsing the collection by albums and select "show under various artists", they show up as seperate albums with the same name. it worked with amarok 2.1beta1.
the "year" tag is different for the files. they range from 1950 to 2000, but the problem persists even if all files are tagged with 2000 as year. the tags are id3v2.4, written with easytag 2.1.6

but i have to admit, that various artists work way better than in 2.0. now there is only that one album, which causes trouble. in 2.0, there where several albums not recognized as various artists.
how does amarok determine which albums are to be shown under various artists, btw?

i've also seen similar problems, so i did some experiments.

i created three new folders A1, A2, A3 and added a copy of a single random track to each folder.
i then used a tag editor to change the Album of each track to "Foo Bar" and made sure all the other details were the same except Artist, Title and Track.

after an update, amarok automatically showed "Foo Bar" under Various Artists as expected.

next i added a copy of another track to A1 *from the same artist as the one already in there* and edited the tag as above.

after an update, amarok now showed the tracks in A1 as a new "Foo Bar" album in the section for that artist and removed the tracks from the "Foo Bar" VA album.

so it seems amarok thinks a VA album must have *all* artists different, rather than just *any* artists different.

finally, i created a third folder A4, moved all the tracks in A1, A2 & A3 into it, and deleted those folders.

after an update, amarok restored the full "Foo Bar" album to Various Artists.

so it seems amarok will allow multiple tracks from each artist in a VA album so long as every track is together in one folder.

i don't know whether this explains any of the issues other people in this thread are having, but i managed to solve most of mine by just re-arranging my music folders a little bit and editing a few tags to make sure there were no discrepancies.

Nice research, bazwal!

i read a bit in other threads in this forum and there seems to be a problem with large various artists albums.
my album for example has about 500 tracks, mostly single tracks i gathered from friends (in germany, thats legal) and cds i didn't want completly. there are several tracks from the same artists. as i said, in beta1, it worked nicely, but now, each artisit has its own album and that makes navigating the collection a bit tedious...

If there are 60+ tracks in one folder, amarok doesn't handle them as a compilation. Patch amarok or try to reduce the files in the folder. Don't know why this should be a heuristic method to detect compilations, but it's in the code and yes it doesn't make any sense.

Greetings
m0nk