[mythtv] Re: [PATCH] Compilation Artist Support (was Multi Artist Support)

Paul mythtv at dsl.pipex.com
Sun Jan 9 09:30:45 EST 2005


Colin wrote:

>Hi,

>Sorry it's taking me ages to do this patch, but my free time is kinda
>changable just now.

>Here is my Multi Artist patch, updated to use the "compilation" flag (I
>was inspired to crack on with this due to the Metadata editor patch
>which also uses this flag although cannot write it to the file's actual
>metadata yet!!). Thor also advised this it would be a good idea to use
>this flag.

<snip>

Just a note to let you know I have tried this patch and it works quite well.
One of the problems with the patch as it stands is for the patch to work
properly there has to be meaningful values set for the 'compilation_artist'
and 'compilation' fields in the metadata table. I was pretty lucky because
I imported the music metadata from another database that already had
a compilation flag so all I had to do was run a simple query to set
the compilation_artist to 'Various Artists' where the compilation flag was
set.

Thinking how this would work for anybody else, simply rescaning probably
would not work because it is unlikely they would have the correct tags in
their
files to indicate which tracks are compilation tracks. They would either
have
to retag all there files or at least all files that are compilation tracks
or use
the metadata editor to change the compilation_artist and compilation flags
in the database, which is not possible at the moment because the metadata
editor does not allow you to change the compilation_artist field, although
it
would be a trivial matter to add it.

I don't think either solution is practical for large music collections!.What
I think
is needed is a routine to scan though the database, probably just after a
re-scan, to
try to determine which albums look like compilation albums and set the
compilation_artist and compilation flags as appropriate.

I knocked together a quick routine that simply assumes any album that has
tracks
from more than one artist is a compilation album. It is far from perfect but
could save
a lot of time by correctly indicating most compilation albums. One of the
problems
with it is it incorrectly assumes may albums are compilation albums, for
example I have
many albums called 'Greatest Hits' from different artists, the routine
assumes
all the tracks belong to one album and therefor incorrectly assumes they are
compilation tracks. I am sure it could be improved a lot, not sure if it
could
be done in a generic way that would work for everybody though.

One solution might be to use one of the online resources such as MusicBrainz
to find out whether and album is a compilation album or not. Not sure how
accurate
they are or whether or not it can be done in a non interactive way without
requiring
input from the user? The MusicBrainz site has an open source library for
accessing the
information but that would require another dependency!! On a plus side we
could
also use the MusicBrainz library to automatically get cover art images.

Anybody any thoughts on this?

Paul




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