Hi all,
This is my first post after two days of discovery with Amarok.

I've just posted a bug report related to the way Amarok handles artists informations
(http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90095).

I thought it could be discussed into this forum so I took the liberty of pasting here
the original comments of my bug report.

Cheers

---------------------------------

Amarok currently simply matches the "Artist" ID3 tag to an "artist" information related to the album.

This is far a too naive approach. The expected behaviour should be something like:

1. Split the "Artist" tag into several artist names,
assuming two artists are separated by a comma or
an "and"; e.g.

"John Doe and Richard Doe"
"Doe, John and Doe, Jane"
"John Doe, Jane Doe"

Separators should be handled just like any
parser of bibliographic data, i.e.:

- if the string contains only commas or "and", treat
them like artists separators
- if the string contains both commas and "and",
treat only "and" as artist separator

2. Have a one-to-many relationship between Album and
Artist, so that the context pane displays informations
related to all artists related to the current album
(e.g., "Albums by *these* artists")

3. Adopt a smarter representation of artists, so that
"John Doe" and "Doe, John" are automatically
associated to the same artist. A first implementation
could ignore the case of homonyms, which
is an acceptable compromise between the precision of
the informations stored and the effort required to
maintain them.

This is also my first post after also two days of using amarok.

First of all very big thanks to the developers of amaroK, this is exactly the piece of software i was looking for since I left Windows and Winamp5.

The only tiny issue is like about the one described here: I have all the "featurings" in the artist's name, and because of that amarok doesn't recognize the tracks being from the same artist or at least being on the same album as the other tracks with diffrent or no featurings at all.
So I would suggest in addition to the things already said that "feat." or "featuring" should be such seperators, too, so that amaroK recognizes the artists as the same, and that they are on one album.

I Also think that this kind of feature would be relly great.

another suggestion like this, is that some Cd basically SoundTrack From a movies have ore than one artist. Now the Tracks and the album goes directly under the artist. wich is normal an great, but it woul also be nice. But only the tracks gos under this artist , not th full album.

would be nice if Amarok would reconize thoses Cd and continue to put the tracks under the artist but also have a categories Various Artist CD's or SoundTracks.

i Think that this category can be built dinamically with a simple query where the Artist Count is more than One on a Cd. like Select count(Artists) AS nb_artist From Where nb_artist > 1. If of course your databse have a n to n relation between artist and CD... if not it requires a lot more changes :s


Thanks for taking time to read this.

i hope it make sense (sorry for my english i'm french from Montreal)

Thanks for your beautiful program and i can't wait until the new release

A feature I really loved in J. River's "Media Jukebox" for Windows, was the ability to set an "Album artist". All songs in the album could have different artists, but when you set the Album Artist to f.e. "John Doe", the album would only appear under the artist "John Doe".

It's the one feature I find in no other application and I'd LOVE (understatement) to see it in Amarok! ^_^