There is a need to distinguish Various Artist Albums for showing in the Playlist. Amarok 2.1 allows the "no grouping" option but this is still sub-optimal. Showing the Artist in the "head" for Various Artist albums is just not appropriate as it applies the Artist of the first track to all tracks and very often the date should also be associated with the track.

I would be in favour of a "Distinguish Various Artists" tick box beside the "Show Covers" tick box which would override the layout applied. Thus default could be replaced by VA_default, custom 1 with VA_custom 1 etc, whenever a Various Artists album is encountered.

The default "head" for Various Artist Albums should remove both the Artist and the date. These values should instead appear in the "body". This will probably require the body layout to be two lines.

In Amarok 2.1 you can choose "album artist" instead of "artist" to be displayed, which, in case of "various artists", displays no artist at all. i guess thats what you want.

karoshi wrote:In Amarok 2.1 you can choose "album artist" instead of "artist" to be displayed, which, in case of "various artists", displays no artist at all. i guess thats what you want.

Yes, I missed that, and it does remove a glaring problem, at the cost of having no artist information in the Playlist. There is however still a need for this Artist information to appear in the "body" of the layout when a Various Artist album is in the playlist without requiring the same layout for other albums.

Agreed: the current default playlist layouts completely fail to handle compilations appropriately.

I made my own layout using the "album artist" tag in the header and "artist" in the body, but it's not a great solution either... (see the attached screenshot)