I like to whine about stuff and therefore that is what I am going to do B)

So, right now, track metadata is stored in abominable format-dependant ways inside the actual track. That\'s no good, because each track exists in isolation and therefore any correlations made between the data are purely guesswork.

Or to describe the real world problem I\'m actually encountering..

I have a couple of film soundtracks; we\'ll use Kill Bill Volume 1 Soundtrack as an example. How do I tag them?

I can start with \"Album\", because that\'s simple. I tag all the tracks from the soundtrack with \"Kill Bill Volume 1 Soundtrack\" as their album. Great. Since I\'ve done that, I might as well tag them all with the year of the album too. Okay, that\'s fine.

Now, what about \"Artist\"? It might seem that I should tag each track with the artist that produced it, but there are multiple artists for this single compilation. If I tag with the correct artist, then there is suddenly a lot less certainty when a program tries to interpret the data, because I\'ve got a bunch of songs with the same album tag but different artist tags. As far as any program knows, these could be part of the same album by multiple artists, or many different albums with the same name by many different artists. Amarok isn\'t any more psychic than any other program can be when it comes to this.

So I tag the artist as \"Kill Bill Soundtrack\" or \"Various Artists\". This makes amarok see the songs as part of a single album, store them correctly in the collection, and sort correctly in the playlist. I can put the real artist in the \"Original Artist\" tag. However, amarok isn\'t aware of this tag, and doesn\'t display it. And my last.fm profile is all screwed up because last.fm doesn\'t know who \"Various Artists\" are.

Two solutions that I see to this particular problem: one solution is a nasty hack and the other is a hard to implement solution that makes baby jesus happy.

Nasty hack: if the Original Artist tag exists, use the Artist tag for grouping/sorting of tracks but use the Original Artist tag for display and sending to last.fm.

Difficult solution that makes baby jesus happy: Implement a proper database for storing track metadata. The tagging process would now go like so:

First, for each artist that contributed to the soundtrack, you create an \"Artist\" entry in the database. This is stored with a unique numeric ID to distinguish from other artists of the same name.

Secondly, you create an \"Album\" entry in the database, again with a unique numeric ID. You call it for example \"Kill Bill Volume 1 Soundtrack\", and you enter the year of release, album cover, etc, and link it to one or more artists. There is also a \"meta-album\" called \"Single\", which I will expand upon shortly.

Finally, for each track in the soundtrack, you create a \"Track\" entry (numeric ID blah blah). For this, you enter the name of the track, the year of release, etc, then link it to one or more artists and even one or more albums. If the track is released as a single, you can link it with the meta-album \"Single\", and amarok won\'t do silly things like try and display the album cover for \"Single\".

Now amarok can display the artist name correctly and still recognise the single album, without having confusion if there are different albums with the same name. You can also have a single file in multiple albums, if multiple albums contain the same track, and you can properly store data about tracks with multiple artists (say, if Hitler and Stalin both recorded vocals for the track \"Hay we like to kill people\").

I\'m just throwing an idea around, it can probably be refined or declared as rubbish. But it\'d be nice to have a solution to this kind of problem.

Can\'t use the database. What happens if someone wants to use a different media player? are they expected to retag everything again?

No, you wouldn\'t have to remove ID3 tags etc from the files, and if amarok really wanted to make things easy for traitorous cowards, there could be yet-another-option to export the database info to ID3 tags.

Or even a plugin to do so. Or just, yes, the infinite horror of having to retag your files hmy: