Re: [Banshee-List] The artist-centric nature of Banshee (particularly the grid view)

["Andrés G. Aragoneses" <knocte gmail com>]

On 01/09/13 17:59, mhelvens wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 5:09 PM, "Andrés G. Aragoneses" [via Banshee
> Media Player] <[hidden email]
> </user/SendEmail.jtp?type=node&node=4651285&i=0>> wrote:
>
>  > I proposed a patch in bug 692107 [1], which I think would fix this bug
>  > too. Do you mind testing it? (If you don't know how to compile banshee,
>  > subscribe yourself to the bug and ask me for a testing DLL, and I will
>  > provide it.)
>
> I know how to compile. But... to be frank, I'm actually quite busy and
> don't have the time. Anyway, this particular bug is the least of my
> concerns.

Well, having a user test my fix would be good anyway. I'll provide you 
with the necessary bits so you spend the least time possible.


>  >> I guess I would classify the album-art thing as a bug. But it seems
> more
>  >> like a symptom of the overall design mindset. Banshee should have
>  >> multi-artist album support, but this support feels more like an
>  >> after-thought.
>  >
>  > Banshee is highly configurable to many different use cases of diverse
>  > users. I think that it wouldn't be difficult to adjust some things to
>  > cover yours as well (but it would require some coding knowledge I'm
>  > afraid).
>
> Again, I don't lack the coding knowledge, just the time. :-) Sorry.

No worries. Then as a user I would simply file each of your concerns 
about Banshee's artist-centric behaviour in our bug tracker (bug filing 
may not be the means to the end, but it is a required premise before 
accepting any code): 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=banshee


>  >> I guess I don't have a specific question, but just wanted to start a
>  >> discussion about this. What are your observations / opinions on this
>  >> issue?
>  >> Might this aspect of Banshee change in the future? (Would you perhaps
>  >> recommend me an alternative application?)
>  >
>  > Firstly I would start talking about metadata: it's not that Banshee is
>  > artist-centric but music tags are, I think. For example: is there any
>  > way to specify more than one artist in a ID3 tag of an MP3?
>
> There are many ways to support this kind of thing despite a restricted
> standard, such as optionally recognizing some likely substrings as
> separator (",", "and", "/").
>
> That being said: yes. In ID3v2.3 the / character is prescribed as a
> separator. In ID3v2.4 it is the null character.

Great, thanks for the info. Then I guess we need to implement this first 
in our tag-parsing library, called taglib-sharp, could you file bugs 
about this? Bug tracker would be 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=taglib-sharp

> And none of this really has anything to do with the fact that the grid
> view can group by [artist,album] pair, but not by album. Nor with the

Good point, please file the bug about this as a feature request for a 
new sorting option for the album grid (seems easy to implement so I may 
go ahead and implement it when you file the bug).


> fact that Banshee insists on showing "Unknown Artist", while in
> reality there may perhaps be NO artist.

This is interesting. I recognize that Banshee's behaviour about tagging 
"Unknown data" when it's simply absent, is less than ideal, but I have 
always assumed it this way for the case of the album field (as there are 
songs which have no album, as they might just be singles), but what is 
the case about "No artist"? What is the use case? Are you really talking 
about music with no artist? Or about other kind of audio?


>  > If there's a bleeding edge version of ID3 which allows this, then I
> guess it
>  > is the time to get the ball rolling.
>
> Oh yeah. Bleeding edge since the 20th century. ;-)

:)