in my opinion, the way amarok 2.3 sorts my music, is not very good.
i have many samplers/compilations or albums with very different artists on it and this makes my music in amarok a little bit unclear.
i give you a little example.
david guetta has many mix- or solo-albums and so these albums are listed under "david guetta".
he also has many albums with featured artists. these albums are listed under "various artists". thats confusing.
if i want to hear "david guetta", i want to see all albums of him.

i tagged my music very carefully and gave all those albums the tag "album artist" and was wondering, that amarok ignores this oder doesn't support it.

in breef: please classify albums by "album artist" when available, if not, then use the actual sort.

right click the album and there should be an option to "Do not show under various artists" under the album sub-menu

There's really no solution to that problem right now, the above tip will only distribute the album into headers for EACH set of artists for the song which is worse than the various artists setting if you want to play the album.

If you want to hear ALL of one artist, simply sort by that artist. If you want only the ones where s/he is credited as the artist, and not (feat. Artist), search/sort by Artist: artist.

There really is no perfect way to sort all the music in everyone's collection, because we all have different tastes and preferences. However, the search makes it super-easy to find exactly what you want, no matter how big your collection is.

Valorie

You could do what I do which is a bit time consuming but may provide what you want

If I have a album of duets say Tony Bennet's Duets (An American Classic), I embed the guest artist in the song's titlet so:

artist=Tony Bennett
album=Duets (An American Classic)
title=Because Of You (with K.D. Lang)

To follow on to Google01103's suggestion -- for many tracks, Picard already has the (feat. Artist) in the track titles. So if you use Picard to tag your albums, you'll get it done that way. I don't know why Musicbrainz chose "feat." over "with", but they did. So it has become the standard way to tag guest artists.

Surely surely surely it doesn't need to be so difficult? My only problem with Amarok (except the crashes but that doesn't bother me so much) is that I cannot sort by Album Artist like many other music players.

I have many albums that are mixed by DJ's that in Amarok either show up under Various Artists or under the individual artist track name. For an album by 2 many DJ's for example this creates 50 tracks with 50 different artists, many of which I have never heard of. As it is a mash-up album I never listen to the tracks separately. Listing my 50+ mix albums under Various Artists defies the purpose of having a library.

The solution seems so simple that I wish I had some programming skills to solve it myself. All I request is adding the "album artist" tag to Amaroks library. For mix albums it gives the DJ name, for non mix albums it is empty or repeats the Artist tag.

Adding this feature would make me immensely happy!

Well, for your specific wish, you can file a bug and label it a wish. Search first, so you don't file a duplicate.

However, something better might be on the way. One of our developers is working with the OpenDesktop folks on a re-write of the Various Artist/Compilation tagging standard. This will fix not only Amarok, but as I understand it, the other music players who use the OpenDesktop system. The problem with going it alone on this kind of stuff is that when people come and go, as they do, they don't want to re-tag their music, and who can blame them?

Valorie

that would be extremely useful. it is not the right way to have albums with featured artists shown under “various artists” or split up under each participating artist. i don’t think it should be a wish, since the current way of sorting the library is simply defective.

when you file the bug, count my vote in. we should look at foobar2000 here: it automatically uses the “album artist” to sort albums, with “band” as fallback, and “artist” as last resort.

There is a patch on reviewboard that allows you to use Album Artist as a grouping in the CB. It should be in 2.4.

Anybody know if this has been implemented? I've been looking for a good music player on linux that does this so far only found banshee but like amorak much better

running 2.5beta, might be in 2.4 (can't test)

Thanks, just found it in 2.4

My search for a linux music player is complete How good is Amorak.