GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 318579
Intelligent handling of Compilations/Various Artists/Mix-albums.
Last modified: 2018-05-24 10:49:28 UTC
I would really like to see a smart solution to handle albums with multiple different artists. An "intelligent" way to solve this would be to automatically classify as Compilation the following: - all albums which reside in he same directory and have songs with *more* than two different artist-names. (to accomodate the common split EP's/Albums) - all albums with artist-name as one of the following (case-insensitive): various, v.a., va, various artists - other clever ways to differentiate an album with multiple artists? This new meta-artist "Compilations" should be placed first in the artist-list in the browser. Cheers, and thanks for the otherwise great work :)
Related: bug 323376
See this ML thread for recent discussion: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/rhythmbox-devel/2006-April/thread.html#00074
Ubuntu bug about that: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/39057 "When you right click on a song and select 'Browse album' (roughly - I'm running it in Finnish), RB shows the songs on the album by that artist. This doesn't work for albums with multiple artists. In short, I'd like to be able to double click on the album name in the album pane, which would move the artist selection to 'all artists', and select the album, so that all the songs on that album would become visible. ... > Thanks for your bug. When right clicking on a song you have the option to browse the album or the artist, the "select album" option doesn't work? What version of Ubuntu do you use? Is that somewhat the same issue than http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318579 upstream? ... Thanks for the reply. Sorry about the ambiguous "doesn't work" in the original report. The "select album" option works, but doesn't move the artist selection to "all artists", so on compilation albums you don't get the whole album. The upstream bug does look relevant, although it would probably be easier just to move the artist selection to "all artists" when the user selects "select album". By the way, the Finnish translation of "select album" is more like "browse album", which gives a stronger impression that you'll get _all_ the songs on that album, not only those by the currently selected artists. "Select album" doesn't give quite as strong an impression. Moving the artist selection to "all artists" and renaming the rightclick action to "browse album" might be a good fix, although it'll remove the functionality to browse only the current artist's songs on that album. The smart VA handling would be good here. If you need more info, please ask."
*** Bug 324666 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 324666 notes that once we support compilation albums, sort-by-album should be fixed so: compilation albums get sorted by track number and non-compilations by artist, so that multiple albums with the same name get handled correctly.
*** Bug 346212 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
See bug #318579, which is about allowing a "disc artist" for Compilations/Various Artists that is used to group all files from a release with multiple artists in the same directory. This does not necessarily depend on this bug.
*** Bug 508538 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 512179 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I'd also love to see this "Compilation-Feature" in rhythmbox. I guess the "I-Tunes way" wouldn't be that wrong. Right click the songs and in the Tag-Menue just klich a checkbox like "Is part of a Compilation" Then the single artists of the album shouldn't appear in the artist box any more. Instead of that, there should be the Albumname. Or even better: If you have like a Chill-out compilation with many cds... you should be able to define an "album-artist" for them (as a tag info - like in windows media player). So in the artist menue there would be the "album-artist" and then in the album menue there would be the different albums by the album-artist. For example... I have a compilation called Buddha Bar So it would be assome if there was something like: Artists | Albums ------------+------------- ... |Album1 Buddha Bar |Album2 .... |Album3 ------------+----------------- instead of all the single artists on the albums. I think this would be soooo aswome!!! I love rhythmbox but i miss this feature so hard. I have a lot of compilations but i don't wanna add them to my libary cause they would mix up my holy order :) Nice greetings from overseas (so please forgive my mistakes with my english :) )
Using albumartist instead of artist when available will solve this bug and would be compatible with the musicbrainz way of doing it. Also, there could be an option in Preferences -> Music | Library Structure which allow to use the artist always. There should be also a new key in the properties (tag edit) of the song with the Album Artist. I think it would be clean and easy to implement.
Recent thread on the issue: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/rhythmbox-devel/2008-March/msg00045.html My $0.02 on how to go about implementing this (please direct general comments to the mailing list thread not here): Basically use the MusicBrainz (MB) "album artist" if available and detecting if an album artist is "Various Artists".If tracks don't have MB 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). 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).
(In reply to comment #12) > 1. allow tagging a set of tracks a compilation (a la iTunes) which in turn > would internally set the "album artist" as "Various Artists". I should note that this is more or less what was proposed in comment #10
Created attachment 114618 [details] [review] Add basic support for album artist This patch adds basic supports for album-artist. It adds a RHYTHMDB_PROP_ALBUMARTIST property which returns the album artist if it's set, and the artist property if there is no album artist set. It then changes the artist property view to display ALBUMARTIST instead of ARTIST. The album artist can be set/unset in the song info property dialog (though I'm totally open to UI suggestions, I think adding an album artist field in there isn't good enough). It's persisted in the rhythmdb, but not read or written from the file tags (id3/...) since this probably needs changes in gstreamer as well. I haven't looked either at how this relates to the RHYTHMDB_PROP_MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID property. And finally, "browse this artist" in the context menu of a song part of a compilation might seem weird after that change, I'd need feedback on that. So I'm posting this patch to get review/feedback about what has been done so far, and if possible to get suggestions as to how to polish the UI/the user experience ;)
I'm really looking forward for this feature in rhythmbox, and I'd like to test the patch but...how can I do ?
Could someone update the patch, as it doesn't work anymore with latest trunk (some files can't be patched) ?
I'll have to find some time to rebase it, will try to do this in the coming days
Created attachment 124646 [details] [review] Updated patch to apply to svn trunk
Thanks! I applied your patch successfully, imported some compilations plus a "normal" album, but everything is regrouped under the "Unknown" artist, although real artist appears fine in the lower tracklist box. Joining a screenshot as I'm not sure to be very clear.
Created attachment 124648 [details] Behaviour of the Various Artists patch
From comment #14 "The album artist can be set/unset in the song info property dialog (though I'm totally open to UI suggestions, I think adding an album artist field in there isn't good enough). It's persisted in the rhythmdb, but not read or written from the file tags (id3/...) since this probably needs changes in gstreamer as well." so I'm not surprised it doesn't work well when importing, I haven't tested file imports.
Okay so I found it in the Property box, still it detects very randomly Various Artists (I got some monoartist albums split). How does Rhythmbox deal with audio tags? Isn't it possible to just read from tag "ArtistAlbum" in the file? I don't know how MusicBrainz deals with that, but seems a good way to me.
Rhythmbox reads audio tags through gstreamer, and I haven't looked at all at what needs to be done in rhythmbox or gstreamer to read the proper tags. Help with that is always welcome ;)
If I comment out this hunk of the patch: @@ -1798,6 +1803,12 @@ set_props_from_metadata (RhythmDB *db, set_metadata_string_default_unknown (db, metadata, entry, RB_METADATA_FIELD_ARTIST, RHYTHMDB_PROP_ARTIST); + + /* album artist */ + set_metadata_string_default_unknown (db, metadata, entry, + RB_METADATA_FIELD_ALBUMARTIST, + RHYTHMDB_PROP_ALBUMARTIST); + /* album */ set_metadata_string_default_unknown (db, metadata, entry, RB_METADATA_FIELD_ALBUM, it seems to work a little more as I would expect - when files are imported they're grouped under their artist name, and the album artist field has to be specifically set to something to be used to sort on.
Is someone still working on this ? I don't have enough programming skills to hack this feature by myself, but I'd be glad to test someone else's work.
(In reply to comment #23) > Rhythmbox reads audio tags through gstreamer, and I haven't looked at all at > what needs to be done in rhythmbox or gstreamer to read the proper tags. Help > with that is always welcome ;) It seems that gstreamer supports ALBUM-ARTTIST (à la iTunes) since v0.10.25: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gstreamer/html/gstreamer-GstTagList.html#GST-TAG-ALBUM-ARTIST--CAPS This version is quite new, but will be provided by the next ubuntu karmic, for example. rb_metadata_gst_tag_to_field() in rb-metadata-gst-common.c maps gstreamer tags and the ones used by rhythmbox. Would be far simple if there was only this function to update..
(In reply to comment #25) > Is someone still working on this ? I don't have enough programming skills to > hack this feature by myself, but I'd be glad to test someone else's work. I would be glad to do the same. I've landed on this page looking for the same feature but from a different perspective. In fact, while I remembered dropping the artwork of an album in the dedicated space, today I noticed that it was missing while playing the very same album again, but a different song. So when I browsed all my covers in .cache/rhythmbox/covers, I realised they were stored by RB by renaming them with the following pattern: Artist Name - Album Title.jpg. Of course, this would mean to re-drop the same artwork for each of the artists in the compilation album. Not a big deal, apart for the repetitive task, but for music folders containing more than 20,000 items the .cache/rhythmbox/covers folder could grow considerably, and the repetitive task could become time consuming and tedious, indeed. Not that I like to drow comparisons between RB and Banshee, but just to add my voice to the above comments, when I used the latter I could navigate to the album properties, and check "Compilation Artist" (or something along those lines) to enable a field where to enter the name that would finally group all the various artists who contributed to the album under one single title and artwork. This was very handy, and took no more than 10 seconds (mono-delays excluded). I too believe that something like this implementation could improve users' experience with this nice little music player we all love. Many thanks!
Wow... it's been 4 years since this has been reported, and still no solution. Thats' sad :-( IMHO this is an important feature as far as usability goes, it's really a pain having to assign the same cover to each artist on a compilation (not to mention the obvious waste on disk space).
Created attachment 158243 [details] [review] Add album artist property to database entries Adds RHYTHMDB_PROP_ALBUM_ARTIST and RHYTHMDB_PROP_ALBUM_ARTIST_SORTNAME (with sort keys and folded versions too). Metadata loaded/saved with GST_TAG_ALBUM_ARTIST and GST_TAG_ALBUM_ARTIST_SORTNAME. The #defines for these properties as extra metadata have been removed. This broke compilation, so any code using extra metadata requests for album artists (audiocd source, and filepath_parse_pattern () in library source) have been changed to use the new properties instead of extra metadata requests. Compiles again. I'm submitting this for review, but realise that there's maybe not any point in commiting until rhythmbox actually does anything useful with the properties. My next step will be to update the song info dialogs :)
Looks OK, except we need GStreamer version checks around anything that uses GST_TAG_ALBUM_ARTIST or GST_TAG_ALBUM_ARTIST_SORTNAME - they were introduced in 0.10.25, but we currently only require 0.10.20. Alternatively we could provide the #defines ourselves if the GStreamer version is too old to have them.
Comment on attachment 124646 [details] [review] Updated patch to apply to svn trunk This overlaps a lot with the more recent patch, and it still uses glade, so it'll need to be updated.
*** Bug 616572 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Initial support for album-artist and album-artist-sortname (including song info dialogs) pushed as commit 037e04e.
Comment on attachment 158243 [details] [review] Add album artist property to database entries (turns out I'd duplicated most of this, so I didn't actually commit this patch, but it's close enough)
I really hope that this feature can become a reality. As it stands, this is probably the single thing that really sours me on Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox essentially gives you two options. The Artist (track artist) pane and the Album pane. In the former, I find myself wading through artists who only have a single track on a Various Artists comp. In the latter, I find myself wading through titles upon titles (mostly of single-artist albums) to find my compilations. It doesn't bear the faintest resemblance to how I would organize actual CDs or vinyl. There, the compilations would all be set aside, for easier access. This relates to an issue I have with Rhythmbox's iPod management, but I'll save that for another bug.
*** Bug 632840 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
For what it's worth, I've compiled rhythmbox myself after doing a search-replace in the code replacing all instances of GST_TAG_ARTIST with GST_TAG_ALBUM_ARTIST. If you have album artist tags in all albums including single-artist albums and you don't use rhythmbox to edit tags, this seems like a valid workaround until album artist columns and whatever are added to rhythmbox's UI. At least I can verify that gstreamer's (version 0.10.30) album artist tag reading works. For vorbis files, it seems to understand the ALBUMARTIST field. For mp3 files I'm not sure since id3 tags are confusing, but it's probably TPE2, which tagging software sometimes call "album artist" and sometimes "band".
Referring to my Comment on Launchpad Bug #253167: So what's left to say? Silently waiting for somebody fixing this bug for more than 2 years now. Even willing to donate some fine amount just for fixing this bug but it doesn't seem as anyone is listening. (I haven't ever learned serious coding, I'd do it like Osmo otherwise) Maybe the devs could at least state a little comment why this bug is completely ignored for more than 7 years now? I'd absolutely appreciate!
Hi I'm not able to fix this on Rhythmbox itself but may be able to write a simple plugin to do this. To do the developers: could you please let me know how hard it would be to write such plugin? All I want it to do is to replace the "artist" by "album artist" if it exists, otherwise use "artist". Thanks, Carnë
Is there a solution or workaround for this problem? Without a intelligent handling of compilations Rhythmbox is a little useless (for me). Very few Linux music player can handle compilations. :-(
(In reply to comment #40) > Is there a solution or workaround for this problem? Doesn't look like there is one, but if anyone knows one I would be very happy to know it. I have about 15 compilation albums and they really clutter my library. All I want is them to be listed as ALBUMARTIST.
What a sad state of affairs..
Since I use Picard (https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard) for properly tagging albums BEFORE I import them into Rhythmbox (and also, before they're copyed into ~/music), I managed to find a workaround for this. Picard has a plugin (included out-of-the-box) called "Feat. artists in titles". The name is pretty self-explanatory. Here's an example: Before: title: "Some song" artist: "Artist 1 feat. Artist 2" After: title: "Some song feat Artist 2" artist: "Artist 1" This results in what we all expect in the artist list in Rhythmbox, etc. I already used picard to complete missing tags (sometimes the year is missing, etc, etc), so it's not really any hastle for me. It may not be the *cleanest* workaround, but it definitely works. I've yet to come any issue with this. (also, replying to CC to issue).
This wish is nine years old only. I guess it will be fixed soon. I'm sure it will...
We are now in 2017. Could we have a statement on why fixing this is not planned, it seems like just adding a simple checkbox. And why this patch https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678706 has not been merged ? Please, if nothing is planned, at least tell us why...
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