Compilation artists should not be listed in artists view separately

[Konstantin Konev]

Binary package hint: banshee

This might be a part of other usability improvement request, but I had not found an explicit bug report for this.
Consider having a huge compilation album from some festival with hundreds of tracks by different performers. This will make Artists view very hard to browse. As suggested in related question[1] this could be fixed by putting some text into "Compilation album artist" field. An elegant solution, but should not Banshee have an embedded solution for that? Many other players do (see screenshot[2] of Clementine, for example).

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[1]: http://askubuntu.com/questions/38960/how-can-i-unclutter-artists-view-in-banshee
[2]: http://i.imgur.com/FAtjQ.png

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Piedro Kulman (piedro)]

"...this could be fixed by putting some text into "Compilation album artist" field"

No it won't help. I write tags to the files, I tag album artist of the "Kill Bill soundtrack" as ""Various Artists" or as "Kill Bill artist collection" (whatever ...). I make sure I saved the changes:

Still I get a list in the browser view left of the album grid including artists like"[dialogue]", "Nancy Sinatra" and so forth ....
I have only ONE album in my collection and the browser view still shows TWELVE entries!

That is still annoying and I said it elsewhere and utter it here again: If someone doesn't grasp the problem here please check out Itunes behaviour because it's very well thought through and the quasi standard people expect to be at least enabled to list AND browse their music collection ...

I really don't get why this is such a big deal: It's just about making the browser view optional as the setting for the folder hierarchy already does ... - the folder hierarchy setting offers "albunartist/album" so PLZ add a setting option "browser view" where users can CHOOSE their preferred browser behaviour.

using banshee 2.3.6 still no change on the issue. It's been discussed for about 6 years now.

piedro

[Oliver (ok23)]

In Banshee 2.6.2 the problem still persists.

[Piedro Kulman (piedro)]

The fix is very simple:

Banshee just has to list artists NOT by the "artist" tag, but by the "albumartist" tag.
That's exactly why this tag exists... alternativly "albumartistsort" gives the list as the sorted list as used by librarians - both easy to use, easy to implement....

If no one wants to change the default behaviour just add an option in which every user can choose or even configure the way the different views rely on standard tags.

For information on tags as most people use them checkout the "musicbrainz.org" project.

Also I recommend using lollypop, clementine, quodlibet or any other music player/organizer out there - banshee is simply not up to date and seems to be neglected, 2.6.2 is a two year old bugfix release...

cheers, p.

[Oliver (ok23)]

"as the sorted list as used by librarians"

That is yet another issue. No librarian would ever sort "Mike Oldfield" under M. The artists name is, for a librarian, "Oldfield, Mike". It's okay to write "Mike Oldfield" beneath the image of the CD, the record company does it also. But it's not okay to sort by the first name...

But Banshee even sorts "NDW" above "Native American", because obviously it sorts all capital letters before non-caps, despite their order being case-insensitive. For librarians... :-)

[Piedro Kulman (piedro)]

That's really bad. There should be a simple config file to adjust which tag is used for each view.

But, well, the tag "albumartistsort" for the album and "artistsort" for the single track artist exactly do what you and the librarian are worried about - listing "Mike Oldfield" as "Oldfield, Mike" and "The Beatles" as "Beatles, The" "The Drunken Sailors" as "Drunken Sailors, The"...

Which still doesn't solve the capital letter issue...

BTW: If you autotag with the Musicbrainz Database these aren't created automatically but edited by users. Check out the Musicbrainz Picard program - it's free and does all that (heavily customizable by settings and plugins)... yeah, you probably knew about it anyway, I get a bit offtopic here in an official bug report... (but who care's... it's not maintained anyway...)

Cheers, p.

[Oliver (ok23)]

Actually, there was a 2.9.1 release very close to 2.6.2, but its changes log does not list any work done on the album artist issue. So far Ubuntu doesn't distribute this 2.9.1 at least not in 14.04...