Hi everybody,

There\'s a usability issue that I\'ve had with almost every database-backed MP3 player I\'ve ever used, and that\'s the fact that they are designed for people whose music collections are made up entirely of complete albums.

My collection has a lot of compilations of various artists, as well as miscellaneous tracks that I\'ve downloaded. When I try to browse through the artists, there\'s like a zillion of them, and each one has a single track. It\'s completely useless.

I\'d like a feature that lets me view either \"complete albums\" or \"compilation albums / miscellaneous tracks\" so that when I browse through the artists, each node will have more than one track under it.

I was hoping that I could use the smart playlists to do that, but apparently you\'re not allowed to write your own SQL queires to create smart playlists. That would be another handy feature.

There is already support for compliation albums (one album, multiple artists). In the Collection Tree, you have to have Album as the root for that to be helpful.

Unfortunately the compilation playlist feature causes another problem. I happen to have two different albums titled \"Millenium\" by two different artists; amaroK assumes they are the same album. This has a variety of unfortunate effects, including listing them together when sorting by album, giving them the same cover image, and listing the album in under \"Compilations containing songs by Front Line Assembly\".

I leave the effect of this on \"Greatest Hits\" to your imagination.

Hi,
no answer here since few months to this item? I just noticed the Greatest Hits mess my Collection. This solution might be simple to implement and doesn\'t increase the size of the database. It should not create doubletes. One solution might be:

[*]A list of names for exeptions for the sorting algorythm. This userdefinable list contains exceptions (e.g. \'Greatest Hits\', \'Millenium\', ...).
[*]The sorting will follow the usual way (strict to the Artist/Album order) as soon amaroK detects that one Album name is appears to have more than one Artist, it will lock if it appears in the exception list. If not --> Various Artists, else --> Artist

Possible Problem: What happens in case one \'Best of\' CD has one or more titles with more than one Artist. Strictley implemented the CD get splitted into two entries. Solution?

One other problem stays open: How to handle CD\'s where the Artist plays together with other Artists (one extreme example is the Santana CD \'Shaman\'). Some users would like to see this CD\'s sorted under the main Artist. A similar approach might be possible. A second list of exceptions In case of \'Album Name\', the Interpret is set to \'XYZ\'

Maybe this gives some ideas to other people here to improve this idea and impolement this changes. But anyway amaroK is as it is already great piece of software. Congrats to the whole Team for this masterpiece!


Best regards from Germany
Rongar

thats true. i have this problem with almost every jazz album. if you browse by artists you have lots of differnet entries for the same artist (for example: holland and johnette; holland and brahem aso.)
maybe its possible to let amarok recognize a specific sign (\" ; \"?) so that i could browse for the \"holland, johnette\" album eighter by typing \"holland\", or by typing \"johnette\". would this be possible?


keep up the fine work..
greetz!

you have to have Album as the root for that to be helpful.

And that\'s the problem - no solution for any other view.

iTunes groups compilation albums under a "Compilations" heading in the Artist field. That would be a great feature - or a basis for a better feature - to have as an option for people that use an Artist/Album (or Genre/Artist/Album or whatever) grouping. It wouldn\'t have to be default behavior. But having a flood of individual artist listings really mucks up a large collection.

Think more like a CD shelf. Breaking it all the way down to individual artists is not useful for many types of use. It should be straightforward to go directly to the album, without giving up the Artist/Album or Genre/Artist/Album view.

Granted, some people are far more interested in individual tracks rather than albums. That\'s fine. Make it a buried option. Just don\'t leave it (or some other solution) out entirely.

I think the basic issue is that we\'re building up the track/album list from the tags on individual files.

It might require a significant redesign, but we might be able to solve this problem (and the fact that erroneous album titles are left in the database even when every track belonging to them has been corrected) by adding another field to the album table for the \"album artist\".

Functinally, if an album has a single artist, we\'d automatically tag the album with that artist. If an album has multiple artists, we should ask the user to confirm that this is a \"Various Artists\" album, offering the option to choose any of the artists on the individual tracks or to enter a new one manually. If an album title already exists, ask the user to confirm whether or not this is a new album. (Naturally, for this scheme to work with minimal user confirmation, music collections should have separate subdirectories for each album.

It would also be nice if we could group multiple disc albums under a single album title, but that may cause siginficant issues with managing the sort lists.