[music] Soundtracks and other "Various Artists" album types are not well supported in the Albums tab

[Victor Thompson]

Currently an album is displayed in the Albums tab if both the album name and artist name are unique. This means that if you have an album called Album1 and two artists, Artist1 and Artist2 both have songs on this album, then two unique albums are listed in the albums tab. However, when the user clicks on either instance of the album, then all the songs in that album are listed as expected. However, only the one of the detected artists are listed in the Artist field for the album.

The expected results, IMO, are that the Albums tab will list one album for each instance of a unique album name only. This is in converse to lp:1268803 which claimed that if two different artists have albums with the same names each album should be listed. It would be nice if we could handle both cases, but I think the case in this bug is the more likely scenario (multiple artists inside a single album).

[Victor Thompson (vthompson)]

While I think the music app *may* be able to manipulate the models to get "Various Artists" to work, I think it'd be best if the mediascaner populated the "albumAritst field in the db with "Various Artists" or similar in these cases and used that as the Artist name for the AlbumsModel.

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

Mediascanner will set "albumArtist" to "artist" if the file doesn't provide this metadata explicitly. So this field should always be available for tracks that at least have artist set.

If you want to provide an album oriented UI, you can do so as follows:

 1. on your ArtistsModel, set albumArtists=true. This will give you a list of album artists rather than track artists.
 2. on your AlbumsModel, set albumArtist instead of artist to restrict it to that album artist.

If your various artists albums have been tagged correctly, then they should show up once. This will also handle cases where the album artist isn't set to the generic name "Various Artists" (e.g. http://musicbrainz.org/release/413397ba-d40d-3e30-b48a-3cabee0c5fc2).

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

And just to be clear, for tracks from a various artists album to be correctly grouped as described above, they all need the TPE2 (mp3), ALBUMARTIST (ogg), or aART (mp4) tag set to the same value.

[Ubuntu Phone Apps Jenkins Bot (ubuntu-phone-apps-jenkins-bot)]

Fix committed into lp:music-app at revision None, scheduled for release in music-app, milestone music-app-14.10-week-40