Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Various Artists

[Alex Lancaster <alexl users sourceforge net>]

>>>>> "BH" == Ben Hellyer  writes:

BH> Hello, Just like to say what a fantastic job you guys are doing,
BH> and with Gnome in general. Im using Ubuntu but have always
BH> preffered Gnome over other Window managers.

BH> I was just wondering if you were considering "Various Artists"
BH> support in Rythmbox; a bit like Amarok has. I have a serveral CD's
BH> that are made up from all different artists and it makes the music
BH> collection in Rythmbox clutter because of the vast amount of
BH> different artist. I was just interested if there were any
BH> blueprints of implementing anything like this?

BH> Unfortunately I don't have enough programming skills to make a
BH> plug-in myself, but I'm guessing one of easiest ways to do it is
BH> to look to see which folder the songs are stored in, and from that
BH> you can work out if its a compilation album or not.

It's been filed as an enhancement request for quite some time now
(since 2005):

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318579

but no developer seems to have been able to get time to work on it as
yet.

There are some suggestions on the bug about how to go about supporting
this.  Basically it would involve plugging in to the MusicBrainz (MB)
"album artist" system and detecting if an album artist is "Various
Artists".

Using file and folder names would be a very fragile way to detect
whether something is a compilation.  For example rhythmbox will
currently rip each track into Artist/Album folders, regardless of
whether the CD is a compilation or not (because it has no concept of a
compilation at the moment).

If tracks don't have musicbrainz tags (e.g. CD wasn't found in MB
lookup, or the file was imported from elsewhere), some kind of UI
could be added which would:

1. allow tagging a set of tracks a compilation (a la iTunes) which in
turn would internally set the "album artist" as "Various Artists".

2. expose a "compilation" checkbox for an album in the CD audio
ripping source that would percolate down like 1).  (If the CD was
found in MB as "Various Artists" the compilation checkbox would be
automatically checked.

Something like this was suggested in the final
comment:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318579#c11

Lastly, once compilation flags were set, rhythmbox would automatically
group all tracks under a "Compilation" artist like iTunes if that
option was set (possibly it should be the default).

Alex