Hi,

I'm using Amarok 1.4 on Debian Stable with an extensive collection of FLAC file. I'm mostly happy, however I would like to improve the way the "Group by" feature works.
I found that for compilation and classical, I'm most likely want to browse my collection the following ways :
Genre - Album Artist - Album
Genre - Performer - Album
In other words, I want to add arbitrary tags to the second level of the group-by feature. It look like something that many might want to do, but I've looked into the various settings of the application, and could not figure how to do it.
Does anybody has a good suggestion on how to do that ? If fixing that involve upgrading to a more recent version, I could consider that...

Regards,

Jean

Neither version 1.4 nor version 2.x offers this.
You may file a wish for version 2.x on bugs.kde.org, although I am not sure what the difference between a performer and an artist is (I see a difference between artist and composer).
However, for me having genre, artist, album, and year is just enough and I am not missing any other field here (consider: what should happen if a certain tag is not present at all?)

marcel wrote:Neither version 1.4 nor version 2.x offers this.

Thanks for the information, I see that there is no point upgrading Amarok.

marcel wrote:You may file a wish for version 2.x on bugs.kde.org

I'll do that.

marcel wrote:although I am not sure what the difference between a performer and an artist is (I see a difference between artist and composer).

It's all very simple, the Artist is the content of the "ARTIST" tag, the Album Artist is the content of the "ALBUM ARTIST" tag, and the Performer the content of the "PERFORMER" tag.

I don't want to start a religious war, but the real answer to your question is that in many consider that in most cases the composer is a greater artist that the performer. Did you realize that the official list of tags for Vorbis and FLAC does specify "PERFORMER" and does NOT specify "COMPOSER" :
http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html

marcel wrote:However, for me having genre, artist, album, and year is just enough and I am not missing any other field here (consider: what should happen if a certain tag is not present at all?)

Well, I guess the same thing that should happen if one of the current available tag is not filled in (many people don't fill composer or year).

Regards,

Jean

jean2 wrote: I don't want to start a religious war, but the real answer to your question is that in many consider that in most cases the composer is a greater artist that the performer. Did you realize that the official list of tags for Vorbis and FLAC does specify "PERFORMER" and does NOT specify "COMPOSER" :
http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html

Which is as much an arbitrary list as any other. It has no more official value than the borked tag use in iTunes by Apple or the more than strange tags used by MuisBrainz/Picard.
id3 is a standard which is composed of as many available tag possibilities as suggested in the id3 specifications: http://www.id3.org/, and the list is huge to say the least

Just to remind you: id3 tags were created with mp3 files in mind, the Vorbis comment used by Flac files came much later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Implem ... ternatives

Those are most of the time just suggestions, it is up to the user to decide what s/he wants to use, some people even never tag their files and only use filenames, other use the multi-tagging capabilities of id3v2.4, others again would like to be able to list a detailed performer list by instrument for classical orchestras...

Sorry, but with the amount of possible choices and combinations it is simply impossible to satisfy every user and/or corner case.