[Rhythmbox-devel] Re: Compilation Grouping

[Alex Lancaster <alexl users sourceforge net>]

>>>>> "JG" == Joe Gillespie  writes:

JG> I'm not sure if this has ever been brought up or not, but I think
JG> one thing that could really help out rhythmbox is the ability to
JG> group compilations. An option under preferences would help out
JG> greatly. For those of us with large music collections, using
JG> rhythmbox can lead to a large amount of clutter as so many
JG> different artists may be listed when it's simply one song in an
JG> album. amaroK, iTunes, and I'm sure other players have this sort
JG> of capability and it makes things much simpler sometimes.

Yep, it's been brought up many times, see:

[Intelligent handling of Compilations/Various Artists/Mix-albums.]
http://bugs.gnome.org/318579

[Don't add artist name to list]
http://bugs.gnome.org/318579

The problem is that it's tricky to 1) detect compilations and 2) to
know where to store the info.  You can't always know if a particular
track belongs to a compilation, because there may be duplicate album
names.  (More integrated Musicbrainz support would probably help here,
but is a non-trivial feature that needs to be added to Rhythmbox:
http://bugs.gnome.org/104203)

Should it be stored only RB's database, should it also be added to the
files?  What kind of user interface would you need to specify that a
particular set of tracks comprise a single compilation?

Alex