[Rhythmbox-devel] Too many rare artists (in compilations)

[Stefan Monnier <monnier iro umontreal ca>]

My list of artists is much too long, because of many artists who only appear
in a few compilation CDs.

I share my song collection via NFS with iTunes and in iTunes, I can solve
this problem with the option to put all the songs that come from
a compilation under the pseudo artist "compilation".

I'm not gong ho about iTunes's solution, but it works OK.
Maybe a better solution would be a more general way to group various
different artists into a single one.  There are several cases:
- different spellings of the same artist.  These are usually just "typos"
  and should be fixed.  I don't think Rhythmbox needs to do much here.
- different sets of related artists (like "Jaco Pastorius" on one song and
  "Herbie Hancock and Jaco Pastorius" on another).  In my experience
  I generally associate the song with one of the two artists, so I end up
  editing the artist field and removing the others, but I don't like
  losing this information.  So I'd rather be able to tell "Herbie Hancock
  and Jaco Pastorius" should be listed under "Jaco Pastorius".  Or maybe the
  song should be listed for each artist instead.
- completely different artists in a compilation.  For this I used iTunes's
  "compilation" option.
- different artists playing the same song.  Typical for classical music,
  where I often hesitate between classifying by composer or by artist.


        Stefan