GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 536059
Album with multiple artists is not managed correctly
Last modified: 2008-06-12 22:33:51 UTC
When you import a multiple-artists album in Banshee (ex : soundtracks from movies), you can see multiple albums with same name in albums browser. Very annoying.
I can confirm this. It's a big issue for me since I have a lot of multi-artist electronica compilations. I noticed some people mentioned that Amarok gives the option to "show under Various Artists", which would work for me, and also that ID3 may support a boolean tag that indicates "is part of a compilation" (apparently iTunes makes use of it). Personally, I would like to see it taken a little further than just display under Various Artists. It would be great if there was another data point to further categorize various artist albums under the Various Artists virtual artist (within the library directory hierarchy). For example, by placing them into dirs for Genre or label/publisher. That way, all my Hed Kandi or Cafe Del Mar album directories would be grouped together on the file system. Thanks for attention to this issue. /djs
I agree that this is a problem. It would be mostly solved if Banshee had a more flexible structure. Why not add a drop-down box to choose the fields in the browser? Then instead of 'artist' one could select to group by the field 'Album Artist' and secondly by 'Album', 'Genre', 'Year', etc. Of course, this depends on the database. The Genre field in CoreTracks should be replaced by a more sensible GenreID number, which means adding a CoreGenres table. IMO this should be pre-populated according to the standard ID3 genre numbers. Also, a new field should be added to CoreTracks for AlbumArtistID, populated with values from the CoreArtists table. Then on media import you can populate CoreArtists with values from both the Artist and AlbumArtist ID3 tags.
I tried to make a playlist, at least, of the 'Various Artists' album I imported today, and found that I couldn't sort in Track order!
Are there any issues with using Album Artist as the default field grouping artists? And the album view should always group albums with the same name and same Album Artist tag.
Created attachment 112639 [details] Album list for a 'Various Artists' album This is the behavior exhibited - this album was imported with Banshee 1.0.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 517671 ***