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In search of a song without album artist

Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2012 12:12 pm
by muued
Hi,
first of all, thanks for creating and maintaining this wonderful player.
I have been playing around with it in the last two weeks and it has been great.
The smart mode nearly eliminates the need to be able to browse the music via 'Album Artist', but sometimes I still want to do that.

So I was quite puzzled, when I tried searching for the song currently playing via smart mode by filtering by the song's album artist and was not able to find it in the list of songs below. After deleting the cache, re-indexing the whole library, and some futile tries to add the song manually without landing in the copy-dialog, I figured out the song had no album artist. As the song was part of an album, as most of the songs in my library are, it wasn't really necessary to have the album artist field filled, as the artist field was 'clear enough'.

I went looking for something like a fall back to artist if album artist is null in the options, but couldn't find sth like that. So I went to my music library and copied the artist name to the album artist field if the latter was empty.

On the one hand I would have liked the strategy to use the song artist as album artist, because I'm usually only getting tingly when I add a compilation to my library paying attention to not flood my artists list and I don't pay that much attention when I add an album. On the other hand other users may behave differently.

So I can understand that I didn't find the song, but still I would have expected otherwise and I don't really like the idea that albums I might add to my library in the future - forgetting to add the album artist again - won't show up under the corresponding artist.
What do you think about this? Just tag your damn music? Or would it be worth the effort to add some sort of checkbox?

In search of a song without album artist

Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2012 10:18 pm
by camaron
But that's just how it is: your music has to be properly tag if you are going to make the most of Guayadeque. When you import music into your library the first thing is to tag it appropriately.

In search of a song without album artist

Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 12:19 am
by anonbeat
I dont see what is the problem? If you want to search for the track that is currently playing just double click over the song title in the player window.
In the other hand you dont need to tag all tracks with album artist. I do only for the albums that have non unique artists.

In search of a song without album artist

Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 3:32 am
by muued
I didn't know that double-clicking feature, that is pretty cool.
But I am glad, that you seem to use the album artist field in a way similar to mine.

So when I want to listen to a band (usually a couple of albums of that band) I look for some interface that shows me all artist in my library (collections grouped away in some way). Clicking on the artist I was looking for I want to select the albums and add them to the play list.
This is the usual use case of a music player for me.

So here is my problem: consider the case I want to listen to a couple of albums by a band named 'ASP' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP_%28band%29 ]. The name is so short that, when I type that into the search field, I get lots of hits that are not interesting at the moment. But when I select the artist name in the album artist list, the songs without album artist set to ASP (but artist name is set to ASP for all albums) are not shown.
How do you solve that if you use the album artist field that rarely?

ps: when double clicking on the band name of the currently played song, I seem to get the songs of all the artists I did that for in the current session. Is that the way it should be? Clicking again doesn't seem to remove the artist from that context.

In search of a song without album artist

Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 3:42 am
by anonbeat
Why dont you just type ASP in artist list box ? once the ASP artist is selected in the albums list box you will see only the albums by that artist
I solve this by selecting the artist ASP in the artist list box and not the album artist

In search of a song without album artist

Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 5:18 am
by muued
I don't really like the idea of having two lists (artist and album artist) of more or less the same denotation.
My artists list is pretty flooded by compilations and I don't like to look at that list - especially when I'm just rummaging around in my library.
I will just have to pay attention to fill the album artist field.

Have you been able to reproduce the behavior I posted in my last ps ?