Re: [Banshee-List] Problem with compilation albums

[Keith Curtis <keithcu gmail com>]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 5:31 PM, Jon Cosby <jon jcosby com> wrote:

On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 13:16 -0700, Keith Curtis wrote:
> Hmmm. I saw that advice but I didn't entirely understand it because I
> thought it was to help with browsing by compilation artist.
>

Each track has an artist and a compilation artist tag. The compilation
artist is not required, but if an album has one, it will be listed by
that artist in the album browser. To assign a compilation artist,

- Select all of the tracks on the album
- Right click and select "Edit track information"
- Check the box "Compilation Album Artist"
- Enter a value for the compilation artist
- Click the button to the right to set all compilation
 artists to this value
- Click "Save"

Do this once for each album.

And if we could have just gotten everyone to retype their Word documents in OpenOffice, it would have saved them having to build a DOC importer. ;-)

The point is, I'm not going to use a tool that has such a high upfront cost.
 

>
> I don't understand why is that necessary. When the albums have the
> same name, why can't the album browser group them together? My music
> collection is basically a bunch of compilation albums so it would be a
> huge pile of work to do this. Why can't software be smart and figure
> this out on its own? (Even assuming that there are cases with albums
> of the same name, then maybe it could use a heuristic and look at the
> directory structure.)
>

You're assuming that people organize their files in basically the same
way. I have compilation albums with tracks in different directories, and
I have a media player with zero folder depth. Would this work in all
cases?

Actually, I was just describing the process of what has been going on for the last decade as I have been sticking CDs into my computer (different operating systems, different ripping tools) and ripping them. Maybe I am "assuming" there are other users who have been using similar software, but I feel pretty safe with that.

P.S. I have never seen a compilation album with tracks in different subdirectories. A much more common problem is that albums have multiple CDs and I think the album browser should handle that.