[Canola] "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

Why is it, if I have my tags done properly on a compilation disc: Artist=actual track artist, Album Artist="Various Artists" or "Compilation", I have to pay the price of either a) having multiple "albums" in Canola or b) by merging them, lose the ability to see the actual artist's name on the display?

Canola should be using the "Album Artist" tag to sort and defaulting to the "Artist" tag to display in such cases... in my humble opinion, anyway.

Wouldn't that be easy enough to implement and satisfy most everyone?

Dissenting opinions?

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

good luck.

Most mp3 players (and mp3 playing software) expects that all songs are part of an "album", and really don't deal very well with those that aren't, usually forcing you to 'pretend' they're part of an album. That's why I have "1 album" on my mp3 player called "Pop Singles" with 15,824 (so far) tracks. It's unwieldy, to say the least.

The Canola guys are no different than the rest, though, and last time I brought this issue up, they weren't the least bit interested in doing anything about it.

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

Briand : read the story here in the forum :)
I believe it's clear there's the tag, but not in all versions of id3. We can support it if we drop support to the others, but to keep doing different things end up in other problems, as it was widelly discussed.

I know it's far from optimal, but there isn't also a single shot that kills the problem. some players uses their compilation, their method and we will not create one.

If there's a standard that is working across people's mp3, please tell us and we will humbly fix our mistake : / but up to know no solution was bullet proof, and always brought other issues to the table. Fix one problem to have complaints from the other side? no thanks.

Br

Marcelo

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

To be perfectly honest, that's a crap answer and you know it. You're already using a non-standard tag, "Album Artist", to display the artist name in all cases. Most ID3 taggers use the "Artist" tag and autocopy the data there to the other field if it's blank. In any event, it seems to me that by failing to offer the end user ANY sort of control over this (or half-a-dozen OTHER items I could easily rattle off) through a simple Preferences dialogue, you're simply assuming that the users are idiots and incapable of using software properly.

Been taking lessons from Steve Jobs?

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

Brian: I agree that we have a universal problem with standalone tracks... but that's not what we're discussing here (really). We're discussing an actual ALBUM for which we can't get a proper onscreen display. There exists more than one solution for this within the ID3v2 specs: either having different entries for the Artist and Album Artist fields, or setting the compilation flag. There's no reason this can't be dealt with properly.

The problem you describe is a similar one, admittedly... for my beloved, aging Turtle Beach Audiotron, I deal with it using a Genre called Billboard Hits and Albums which duplicate the "Year" field. Keeps things manageable with thousands of hit singles. Sort of. For the other oddball stuff, I use the same solution you do: a bogus "album" called Miscellaneous Tracks.

But we're not talking about a *sorting* issue here. I could not possibly care less how Canola sorts the things as long as they're sorted properly (which they are now). What I'm talking about is what's displayed on screen in the Now Playing screen. Seems to me that the screen should be displaying what's in the tag.

Either tag.

What's being displayed now (for discs Canola has been told are compilations) doesn't come from the tag at all.

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

Sd, you can be perfect honest. If that's your opinion (and you are talking about your tags) you can make it public here. No problem.

But I was saying to look at the history. simple. Reading now your answer to briand I realize that I indeed thought you were complaining about the scanner treating the tracks as separated albums. Id3v2 doesn't help us, we "support" everything since id3v1 (what causes the awful bug in the genres as well) and we had problems. BUT if you pointed that the problem is actually what is being displayed...
indeed after the compilation, for the DB canola will copy the tag and save on the DB, not show what's on the tag. We don't change the users tags, this is your data. and just to let you know, most of the users we care more don't know what an id3 tag is (this doesn't make them stupid - they just don't care) and we do want to offer them proper controls, but as a simple solution didn't appeared we decided to move on with more important things like making the scanner works properly and so on.

well, like I said in the past : you can help us build it, or you can have your money back if you are not satisfied. You have plenty of options to use if you don't like our software. We are more than happy to hear and fix users problems (as we have been CLEARLY doing since the first release) but if you decide to be sarcastic, you can simply drop the software and use the others. I think they will indeed answer you politely and fix your problem, if they haven't done so because it's easy to solve it right? And We are just "ignoring" the problem, like Briand says. Sometimes I really don't understand this :/

You really don't need to sarcastic or agressive here.

ps: about the preferences for this and the other dozen: Don't even wait for that. That's the point of our software. you want preferences? now you can use amarok on your tablet. We are not searching for preferences for everything. So we are prepare to not be able to please everyone, and that's the beauty of having choice, if doesn't please or serves you, you change. We lose one user indeed, and that will make us sad, but we are not going to fill the software with preferences if our goal is to be the opposite.

BR

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

This seems to be a good place to post a small annoyance I have...

After I merge an album in Canola, the artist will always show up as Compilation. I'd like to see Canola use the merging for sorting, and the actual tags for the "Now Playing" display. This is somewhat like what the OP was talking about, but it doesn't reqquire Canola to read any more tags than it already does.

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

*sigh* ID3 is just a broken metadata format (ID3v2 too)

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

thats why i stick to the old winamp way of dropping everything into one big playlist and then search it for whatever i want to listen to ;)

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

Actually, that's not "somewhat like" what I was talking about... it's exactly what I was talking about!

Give that man a cigar! :cool:

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

Wow. Just wow. Take a look at the entire Linux community and then come back here.

"Shenanigans!"

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

Hi Sds,

I think that's the point, if you want to troll you can do it, but then you have a lower voice, if you punch us, but politely; we will not only listen more, but we will try to solve faster. If you didn't see this, our code is not open source, then don't compare us to a linux community :)

Marcelo

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

So let's do this SD:
The problem is not only known, but "high" priority, and some solution ( I can promise a id3v2 only solution now) will be made, to fix the display of data of a merged album.

Beta10 is going out in a few days, so this will be in beta11 for sure.

this way we solve the problem and avoid flames for nothing. We have a bug, we will fix it.

Br

Marcelo

Re: "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

I also don't like the "album artis" tags to be displayed instead of the "artist" because most of my music is "various artist" albums. It even scrobbles the "album artist" tag to last.fm making "Various Artist" my favorite artist, making that plug in worthless to me. I can change the "album artist" on all my tracks but than it will make some big problems in mediamonkey.
Please fix this for us. It can't be that hard to code?

Re: [Canola] "Compilation": a terrible compromise
 

I'm afraid I don't understand why this is hard. If someone would please explain it to me in small words on drool proof paper, I'll be grateful. :-)

Any media player should display the album title, the song title, and the name of the artist. When it's a compilation album, the artist tag is the one to display, not "Compilation" as Canola does.

If that is not the way it's supposed to work, then please tell me how I must re-tag my music. I don't like it that last.fm thinks my favorite artist is "Various Artists". :-(