I did a rescan of my collection this morning and lots (probably 100 or so) of my albums are now in the the various artists grouping and this is not correct, nor was this an issue in the 2.3 series

What I've noticed (and this may not explain all) is that if an artist name includes an "&" or the word "and" or that there are multiple albums with the same title (even though the artist is different) they are then places under "various artist". Also, if the composer field is filled in even if the album is not classical it becomes "various artist" (in these cases the composer field is being used for the author of the music and/or lyrics I assume).

ps - as they need to be removed individually by right clicking "do not show under various artist" it is painfully slow. If it is believed the criteria being used is correct (which I would disagree with) then there needs to be a way to toggle those criteria off and on, disabling of the "various artist" grouping or the ability to move everything out of "various artist" grouping in mass.

re: composer, if within the classical genre this is the proper way to handle things then the condition used should be something like: if (genre=(classical|symphony|chamber) & (composer NE " ") then .............

If album artist is empty, new scanner will assume a collection/VA according to rengels. See cpu load issue topic.

m0nk

Dieter Schroeder wrote:If album artist is empty, new scanner will assume a collection/VA according to rengels. See cpu load issue topic.

m0nk

that's not good considering afaik none of my tracks have "album artist" tags filled in per both kid3 and easytag (the field is not displayed according to a sampling of tracks), though when editing tracks from within Amarok they all seem to have the "album artist" tag filled in (maybe collection manager dups the artist field internally when I forced to not display in various?).

When ripping a track using k3b, audex and gnormalize - Kid3 (my tagger of choice) shows no "album artist" tags. If this is the case should the "album artist" tag be given so much weight when determining "various artist". What ripper automatically generates this tag? I know iTunes does but what Linux ones?

Dieter - fyi I'm trying to create a thread focused soley on the "various artist" classification.

Actually,
if the album artist is empty the "artist" will be used.

Using the composer as album artist for classical music is quite a good idea.
On the other hand, if you want to have the composer as "album artist", then why not just set it like this.
And on another different hand I've just taken a look at the id3v2 spec and that one says that the TPE1 frame (which we are using as album artist) is not meant for the composer.
And to bring yet another hand into play the collection browser you can also set to sort by "composer". That should display your classical tracks in the way that you expect it.

So again it's not that easy.
Could you think about what you really do want to have (sort the albums by composer, have a "classical" option or importing composers as album artists) and then do a "wish" bug report.


Again,
send me the output of the amarokcollectionscanner and I can have a look at all albums that are incorrectly sorted or thrown together.

rengels - after a full rescan I am seeing 100 or so fully tagged albums (with album, and artist tags filled in) in the "various artists" grouping. The only reasons I can see (based on a quick look at the tags) is:
- artist name includes an "&" or the word "and"
- multiple albums with the same title (even though the artist tags are different). Albums such as "greatest hits"
- the composer field is filled in even if the album genre is not classical
ps - I have 20 or so classical albums out of 2,000
pss - these 100 or so were earlier individually moved out by individually by right clicking "do not show ......." but the full rescan reclassified them, which you might argue is correct for a full rescan to do but I would argue that a) most (if not all) shouldn't be various in the first place, b) there should be a way to process them out of various other than doing it individually (as with a large number it is painful) and c) there should be configurable options on how or if the various artists grouping is processed

re: "Using the composer as album artist for classical music is quite a good idea", I'm not disagreeing I'm just saying that it appears (emphasis on appears) that if the composer tag is filled in (say Cole Porter) no matter the genre the album is classified as "various artist" and I think composer should only be used if the genre is classical

Send me the amarokcollectionscannerlog of the greatest hits and the other wrongly sorted albums.
Just those parts please.

rengels wrote:Send me the amarokcollectionscannerlog of the greatest hits and the other wrongly sorted albums.
Just those parts please.

you'll need to explain what and where I'll find it as after a fresh rescan I only see one log file "collection_scan.log" and it's dated 11/26/2010 size=175B. Also, how will I id those "wrongly sorted albums"?

though there's still a very large number in the various category I'm not sure it's the same as the previous rescan (weird but true). The "&" and "and" don't seem as prevalent

In the meantime here's a pic of part of my various grouping http://simplest-image-hosting.net/jpeg-0-am2

Seems, that the album artist field is now filled automagically. I had the same problem with sending a log: I don't have one. I've now set the album artist manually on the affected albums, but this can't be the solution. As I already wrote in the other thread, the old scanner uses some kind of fuzzy logic to determine VA albums with more effort than using album artist.

Regards
m0nk

Dieter Schroeder wrote:Seems, that the album artist field is now filled automagically.

but not if the album is binned "various", then it is empty - I'm thinking once you perform "do not display under various" the "album artist" field is filled in (not in the actual file but in Amarok's db).


ps - "automagically", gonna add that word to my vocabulary

Nice word, yes. I'v ripped some albums and after amarok added them to the collection, the album field was filled. Must be amarok, because I still use the same version of easytag, which doesn't set the album artist. All my albums, which were listed under VA, had the same title. I didn't notice the ampersand/"and" problem here.

m0nk

If you have albums that are not sorted according to your preferences, this is what you should do.
Type:

amarokcollectionscanner -r "~/Music/the album" "~/Music/another_album" > scanner.log

Then send the result to ralf-engels@gmx.de

There are three possible results:
1. I can tell you which tags are preventing the correct sorting
2. I can explain to you why there is currently way that the scanner could detect your border case
3. The scanner has a bug. In this case I will add a new auto test and correct the bug, hopefully in time for the new release

rengels - examples sent

This thread is inactive since Dec, may I know the status? I just got the same problem. After many years of using Amarok without any problem on that side, and withough changing anything to my tags, it got all messed up after a rescan... Besides, I don't ahve the "do not show under various artists" option

rengels: I just sent you a log

bricerebsamen wrote:This thread is inactive since Dec, may I know the status? I just got the same problem.

Could you at least tell us which Amarok version you are talking about? There has been a lot of changes in the database code since that time, so maybe it is just solved since.