[mythtv] [PATCH] Album Artist support for MythMusic (good for soundtracks/compilations etc.)

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi,

This is the first patch I've submitted and wonder if it can be 
incorporated into the main branch?

Feel free to make recommendations on implementation and coding style (my 
usual C++ coding style is a bit different to the main styles here - I 
also refrained from putting in Doxygen comments, though this is almost 
2nd nature now!)

Reason for patch:

My music collection comprises mostly full albums. Some of them are just 
regular albums where a particular artist sings a load of songs! This is 
easy. Each track has meta data that has the same artist on it and the 
sorting/formatting of data in MythMusic is all neat and tidy.

BUT, I have some albums which are soundtracks, compilations or mixes 
where a DJ will mix and blend the tracks together. On these albums, each 
track has it's own artist and the meta information reflects this. With 
these albums the artist list in MythMusic becomes very untidy and hard 
to manage.

So, in the past, when I ripped to MP3 format, I used the TPE4 id3v2 tag 
(Interpreted, remixed, or otherwise modified by) to store the "Album 
Artist". When I converted to use Ogg, i made up a tag name of "mixedby" 
and used that in the same way.

What I've basically done in this patch is modify mythmusic to have a 
config option to represent the Artist list in a way that allows me (and 
I presume others) to have a neat artist list.

It adjusts what metadata is extracted from the files and stores 1 extra 
column in the musicmetadata column.

When a track has an "album artist" associated with it, this is what 
appears as the artist in the laylist tree. The title of the track has 
the track artist name in parenthesis after the title of the song.

The same goes for the display when playing the songs.

In order to prevent the schema upgrading past my change to another 
change, I had to comment out a new block of code. I don't think it is in 
use at the moment tho'.

The fact this is governed by a config option should mean it doesn't 
change anything by default, and infact you will have to rescan the files 
to extract the correct metadata anyway.


Let me know what you think of the patch, both in usefulness and 
implementation.

I'd be happy to fix anything that is recommended.

Col


-- 

+------------------------+
|     Colin Guthrie      |
+------------------------+
| myth(at)colin.guthr.ie |
| http://colin.guthr.ie/ |
+------------------------+

"The Computer is Down"
If our world needs an epitaph, and it may, could there be any better?
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