Wiki entry on "various artists" or Compilations

[slimkid]

There is only a concept of a compilation album, not compilation tracks.

It's the combination of songs on an album that defines if an album is a compilation or not.

Tags are always entered against songs (obviously!). Any compilation tags on songs refer to the album, not the song, and similarly album artist tags really refer to the album, not the song.

It does not make sense to have differing values for compilation or album artist tags for songs on an album. An album is either a compilation or not.


Perhaps I don't quite understand, but if you want track artists to appear in the Browse Artists list, then isn't the solution to select "List compilation albums under each artist" instead of "Group compilation songs together"?

The problem is that using ALBUMARTIST tag sort of puts track artist in the back row. Manipulating COMPILATION tags on particular tracks resolves it. It has nothing to do with the concept of compilation album or any other concept. It just works and, if I'm not mistaken, that is what the OP wants to know.

K

[Philip Meyer]

>But they are not identical. The "Various Artists" that appears under
>"V" only contains compilations that *also* have artist="Various
>Artists". In my test case several compilation albums (eg with
>different track artists) did appear under the first VA item but did not
>appear under the VA item at "V".
>
Ah, I think I was mistaken. I went to Browse Artists > V section, and Various Artists was listed for me at the top. However, the "Various Artists" entry is the special one that appears at the top of any Browse Artists page. i.e. I don't have two "Various Artists", just the specil "Various Artists" that is listed on every page.

Compilations are listed under the special "Various Artists" entry. If you have compilation albums that also have an album artist, they are listed under both "Various Artists" (because it's still a compilation album), and under the album artist name.

[Philip Meyer]

>The problem is that using ALBUMARTIST tag sort of puts track artist in
>the back row. Manipulating COMPILATION tags on particular tracks
>resolves it. It has nothing to do with the concept of compilation album
>or any other concept. It just works and, if I'm not mistaken, that is
>what the OP wants to know.

That's right - compilation albums or albums with album artists will have track artists instead of artist roles. SC only lists artists that have artist role, and not track role, unless "List compilation albums under each artist" is selected.

So you can browse a list of all artists, or only artists with albums, but not a mixture, without manipulating the database content manually.

Messing about with the content of the DB manually isn't a great idea! Perhaps an alternative solution to your situation would be to add Diana Krall as an additional album artist for that one track (I haven't tried this, but I think in theory this would make both album artists browseable, and other track artists would not appear browsable).

The original question was:
> Q: Does the presence of a tag COMPILATION=0 override the VA detection
> and force an album to not be identified as a compilation? (In which
> case, under what artist would it be listed?)
Setting COMPILATION=0 does override VA detection; such that the album will not be a compilation, but instead be several albums, and each contributing artist will take a normal artist role, and thus each will always appear under the Browse Artist link. But that is unlikely to be what anyone wants, unless two albums have incorrectly been joined together ("The Greatest Hits" problem).

[slimkid]

...
Messing about with the content of the DB manually isn't a great idea! Perhaps an alternative solution to your situation would be to add Diana Krall as an additional album artist for that one track (I haven't tried this, but I think in theory this would make both album artists browseable, and other track artists would not appear browsable).
.....

Philip,

if you get back and re read the example I have presented, you'd see that I already have Diana Krall as an artist of her solo albums. She does appear in a list of artist with or without Ray Charles' album. The problem is that Dian Krall who sings on a track with Ray Charles doesn't 'see' Diana Krall solo artist. They have different roles (artist and track artist) and those roles don't lead to each other in browser links or drilling down in SB. So, all my exercise with the Compilation tags has a purpose to enable that, to equalize track artist and artist in visibility to each other, that is.

Actually, there is even inconsistency in this behavior (if COMPILATION is not set). Track artist can't see artist. Artist can see track artist but only on the first level of browsing. If you keep drilling down or follow the artist link further from the first level, then track artist's albums also disappear.

I understand that it might not make sense to you, but that is how it works, and that is how I use it to achieve desired behavior. If you have more elegant solution that achieves the same, I'm all ears (but please, try to understand the problem before reacting)

K

[Philip Meyer]

>Actually, there is even inconsistency in this behavior (if COMPILATION
>is not set). Track artist can't see artist. Artist can see track artist
>but only on the first level of browsing. If you keep drilling down or
>follow the artist link further from the first level, then track
>artist's albums also disappear.
>
>I understand that it might not make sense to you, but that is how it
>works, and that is how I use it to achieve desired behavior. If you
>have more elegant solution that achieves the same, I'm all ears (but
>please, try to understand the problem before reacting)
>
Your example wasn't clear to me initially, but I think I understand what you mean by "Track artist can't see artist" now, following your second example of compilation album track artists. I think in actual fact, I raised a bug similar to this a while back myself. See if this makes sense to you, and whether you think it's the same issue:

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7836


Essentially, when clicking on an artist link, I'd expect to always see all albums by that aritst, not just the albums where the artist appears with the contributing role selected.

eg. If you click a track artist, you only see other albums that contain that artist as a track artist (and not as an artist, album artist, band, composer or conductor).

[CatBus]

Perhaps an alternative solution to your situation would be to add Diana Krall as an additional album artist for that one track

No, you'd need to make Diana Krall the album artist for all tracks on the album. I run into this problem all the time in my collection and it's pretty easy to fix this way. As far as I'm concerned it's not a problem in SqueezeCenter, which simply doesn't have enough information to work with until you do this.

The downside is that ALBUMARTISTSORT is currently unsupported, so unless you have another track in your collection with both ARTIST and ARTISTSORT (but NOT ALBUMARTIST) defined for the particular artist, it will sort wrong. Argh.

[slimkid]

...
Essentially, when clicking on an artist link, I'd expect to always see all albums by that aritst, not just the albums where the artist appears with the contributing role selected.
...

Yes, I think you are right there. Interestingly enough, right now there's a thread going on where people consider a bug the fact that when artist has artist role in one album and composer role in other, then both albums are visible from that artist regardless of 'include composers in artists' check box. So, SC will make roles of composer and artist 'see' each other, but not artist and track artist. Go figure.

K

[Philip Meyer]

>Yes, I think you are right there. Interestingly enough, right now
>there's a thread going on where people consider a bug the fact that
>when artist has artist role in one album and composer role in other,
>then both albums are visible from that artist regardless of 'include
>composers in artists' check box. So, SC will make roles of composer and
>artist 'see' each other, but not artist and track artist. Go figure.

I am seeing the same effect, which I think is more evidence that 7836 is a bug, rather than desirable functionality.

In Music Library Settings, I have the Composer checkbox unticked, so artists that are only composers (or track artists) do not appear in the Browse Artists list.

I have one album "Piano Sonatas" where I have set the ARTIST=Ludwig Van Beethoven (tagged incorrectly - should just be a composer).

If I browse Artists > Luwig Van Beethoven, I see that album only, and not the albums where he appears as only a composer (which is correct).

If I browse to a song on an album, for which Beethoven is a composer, eg. "Browse Artists > Various Artists > Classical Chillout - Platinum > Für Elise", and then click on the "Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven" link, I do see all albums that he appears as an artist and composer.

So I feel there is an inconsistency.

Browse Artists should only list artist and album artists plus any extra checkboxes that are ticked in the Music Library Settings (which it does)
But browsing to an artist from an album or song, should always list all music that the artist has been involved with.

The internal mechanism of holding contributor roles should be transparent to the UI. So, there's no need to show "Track Artist:" labels, they are just artists. Track Artist contributor roles are exist just to determine whether artists should appear in the Browse Artist list.

There should really be additional menus to Browse Composers, Browse Conductors, Browse Band/Orchestras, rather than lump them all (conditionally) in the Browse Artists list. I use Custom Browse to provide those currently.

[Philip Meyer]

>The downside is that ALBUMARTISTSORT is currently unsupported, so
>unless you have another track in your collection with both ARTIST and
>ARTISTSORT (but NOT ALBUMARTIST) defined for the particular artist, it
>will sort wrong. Argh.
>
Yes, that is a little annoying. Same goes for Composer, Conductor and Band tags. They all need SORT tags too!

[Philip Meyer]

I started to look through that list of bug reports; many are already fixed, some have nothing to do with compilations. Some are controversial. I added comments on a couple of them.

In reality, there don't appear to be many bugs open about real confirmed issues with compilation tags.