Hi
Please tell me the secret!
What tag needs to be set to ensure an album shows up under V.A and is not split up?
thanks.

well I finally solved it if anybody has had the same problem.
I was keeping 3 or 4 part albums in one folder eg: 'Roots of funk - disc 1, Roots of Funk - disc 2, Roots of Funk - disc 3' in a folder called 'Roots of Funk'.
Thats when Amarok splits the artists.
so either put the 3 discs into separate folders, or rename them all the same album title.
I was going spare looking for various combinations of tag that would do the job.
In the end it doesnt matter if they are tagged VA, Various or whatever .. as long as they have the same album name & different artists in the one folder.
obvious?
took me a while anyway!
I thought that the differentiated tags would suffice. But they need to be physically separate as well.

one quirk I have noticed is that any compilation album where all the artists are tagged 'Various Artists' or 'Various' don't get filed under the topmost 'Various Artists' section, rather under V.
a possible solution is to tag them unknown1 unknown2 etc I suppose.
But it's great not having to separately file hundreds of albums with a right click 'show under various artists' anymore.
and with that ... I'm outta here
been great chatting!

Well, the Various Artists tag is an album tag, not a track tag. So, as you have correctly figured out, if Amarok sees 1. an album tagged VA, 2. all tracks in the folder have the same album tag, and 3. the artists are all different, they should be put in the VA section, *unless* the user wants them filed with the artists. That's just logical, right?

How would you do it differently?

Valorie

sure it's logical.
It is also logical to presuppose that a VA album with maybe several album tags (differentiating cd1>5 for example) would still be treated as a VA album ... thats what i tripped over for ages, cd -1 & cd -2 would be differentiated via tag whilst residing in the one uber-folder, that was enough for the whole thing to be split by artist.
I mean ... I like(d) to keep the numbering structure like so, for example a typical V.A album with 60 tracks and 3 discs may be have tracks titled: disc#-track#-artist-title.mp3 - renamed via tags using a tagger.
Whereas in fact, in order to be filed under VA, they need to be stripped of disc# references or vol# references & all be called the same album name.
Not normally an issue, unless its the rolling stones top 500 albums for example .... I find 500 tracks in one folder to be a little too much for my limited RAM to parse.
How would I do it differently?
I would ask the user to specify a V.A folder and any album found in there is automatically filed V.A, but I'm old school ... I collect albums, not tracks ... I actually dislike seeing only one track show up under an artist, I would far rather see all 30 tracks in the album.
Still you can't please everyone & nor should you.
I'm actually just happy to have the answer, which eluded me for so long.
another thing I would do is upon expanding the Various Artists section, to be able to see the artists as well as the title (without having to line up a playlist & check there)
One thing I must do now though is roll a joint and have a lavazza.

peace and cucumbers to you all.

Filenames don't influence any sorting in the collection, bur proper tagging does. There is a tag for sets. Ever used this one? You can have all discs in one folder, but the album tag must be the same for all tracks. Then the set tag is used to differ betwen the cd numbers.
I've sets with eight CDs in one folder (Some will remember the hazzles with more than xx tarcks in one folder), but due to the CD-Nr they are properly filed under V.A and show up as CD1, CD2...

m0nk

yeah I realize that its the tags that matter & not the filename per se.
I've been using the disc# tag but unnecessarily including that information in the album tag also ie: name_of_album_-_disc_1 etc. Which has been the cause of the problem all along.
This I believe stems from the fact that I organize my collection so that it can be easily browsed and understood on disc as well as in a database.
Other media players parse the tags via xml I believe, and simply lay it out as you have done, grouping via album name.
This is the first time that I have encountered the behaviour of splitting up a collection of tracks that share identical album names.
One should always remember:
It's all fun and games .. until someone loses an ipod!

Just to clearify it: Amarok is in NO way interested in the filename. Amarok sorts the tracks only by tags.
An example: One track from ABC called DEF has ABC - DEF.mp3 as file name. Amarok will sort it under Artist ABC's track DEF. Now you rename it to i_really_dont_care_about_your_filenames.mp3 it will still be sorted the same way.
My collection folder structure is: Initial->Artist->Album->Artist - Track.mp3
Multivolume sets with various artists are filled under the folder Various in the subfolder albumname no matter how many cds are in the set. If the albumname is the same over all tracks, but the CD# differs, the tracks will be correctly sorted under VA.

valoriez wrote:Well, the Various Artists tag is an album tag, not a track tag. So, as you have correctly figured out, if Amarok sees 1. an album tagged VA, 2. all tracks in the folder have the same album tag, and 3. the artists are all different, they should be put in the VA section, *unless* the user wants them filed with the artists. That's just logical, right?

How would you do it differently?

Valorie

What I'd do differently is make ALL tags that matter editable in Amarok. I have some non-Va albums that ended up in the VA section. How can I take them out of it if I can't access the tag?

edit: I was able to fix it because I use an external database. There's no such thing as a "v/a tag" field in the album table. What happens is there's an artist field which can be set independently of that for the tracks, and it was left blank for the tracks tossed in the V/A section. So all you have to do is query for the artist ID and set it there. That's definitely a bug in Amarok because my other players recognized the tracks correctly.

Tiwaz711 wrote:
edit: I was able to fix it because I use an external database. There's no such thing as a "v/a tag" field in the album table. What happens is there's an artist field which can be set independently of that for the tracks, and it was left blank for the tracks tossed in the V/A section. So all you have to do is query for the artist ID and set it there. That's definitely a bug in Amarok because my other players recognized the tracks correctly.

I'm a little confused by this thread...

If the Artist field was not filled in, how do you expect Amarok to 'recognize the tracks correctly'?

As far as I now there is an Artist field, period. You can select tracks individually and edit this field just for that track. If the Album field was previously filled in you can select by Album and edit the Artist field for all the tracks from that album at once. If you hold down the 'Shift' or 'Ctrl' key while selecting to select multiple files you can edit the 'Artist' field for all those tracks at once. Any way you do it you are editing the same field. Were you expecting something different?

Later, Seeker

seeker5528 wrote:I'm a little confused by this thread...

If the Artist field was not filled in, how do you expect Amarok to 'recognize the tracks correctly'?

As far as I now there is an Artist field, period. You can select tracks individually and edit this field just for that track. If the Album field was previously filled in you can select by Album and edit the Artist field for all the tracks from that album at once. If you hold down the 'Shift' or 'Ctrl' key while selecting to select multiple files you can edit the 'Artist' field for all those tracks at once. Any way you do it you are editing the same field. Were you expecting something different?

Later, Seeker

The issue is you have 2 different artist fields. One in the track table, another in the album table.

Even if you set the artist and album correctly for the tracks, you can still have the tracks wrongly displayed in V/A if the (second) artist field located in the album table is left blank for some reason. And unless I'm wrong, it's not possible to edit the artist field from the album table without tinkering with the database.

You can edit the album artist tag with a mass-tagging software like kid3 or picard. Of course, Amarok writes or deletes the tag when you add or remove an album or track from "Various Artists" as well, you just don't see it in an editor.

Tiwaz711 wrote:The issue is you have 2 different artist fields. One in the track table, another in the album table.

Even if you set the artist and album correctly for the tracks, you can still have the tracks wrongly displayed in V/A if the (second) artist field located in the album table is left blank for some reason. And unless I'm wrong, it's not possible to edit the artist field from the album table without tinkering with the database.

I think I see where the confusion is coming in.

Different tagging programs may display tags differently and give the appearance that there is an 'Album Table' and a 'Track Table' each with their own set of fields.

But unless I missed something in my research, there is only one table with one field for each possible tag. So the Artist field is the same whether you are tagging an individual track or setting tags for multiple tracks at once.

Separate from the 'Artist' tag there is an 'Album Artist' tag and if you look at Mamarok's explanation, it would seem the 'Album Artist' tag is supported by Amarok for the usage it was primarily created for which is to indicate that an album is a compilation of various artists.

The secondary intended usage of the 'Album Artist' tag, which would require actual editing of the field, would be for cases where you always want the artist listed the same way, but the artist wasn't always listed the same on the album, for example you would want all Rainbow releases to be grouped under one artist name but the way the name was shown on the Album covers went from 'Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow' to 'Rainbow featuring Ritchie Blackmore' and finally to 'Rainbow', so you would use Rainbow in the Artist field and use the name as it was listed on the album in the 'Album Artist' field.

In a program that is designed with more advanced tagging features to make mass tagging more efficient, tags may be represented with one table for the album and one for the track, just for the purpose of allowing you to more quickly edit all the tags without having to select each track individually to edit the track specific tags and I can see how they may have the temptation to add confusion by abbreviating 'Album Artist' as 'Artist' in the album set of fields, since it is in the album part of the listing, but that shouldn't change the way the tags are actually stored in the file so the the actual field name of the tag as stored in the file would still be 'Album Artist'.

The 'Album Artist' tag isn't something I had previous knowledge of, this is based on what came up for me in a Google search while trying to make sense of this thread.

Later, Seeker