[the_norm]

Hey everybody.... trying to do sth, hope you can help:

Is it possible to add or edit views in music library view?

Currently I have "genres", "artists", "songs" and so on... What I would like is to add "album artists" view to reduce the number of clutter in my artist list (album artists are necessarily containers for entire albums while artists may contain only one or two songs which are present on compilations). I'd also like to remove some I don't use...

Cheers,
Norm

[KidKiwi]

Cant you set this up using a smartplaylist?

[jmarshall]

Showing albumartists only in the artist listing can be enabled via advancedsettings.xml

[the_norm]

Showing albumartists only in the artist listing can be enabled via advancedsettings.xml

Oh.... it's the <hidecompilationartists> setting... for some reason I intuitively thought compilationartist = albumartist ... makes sense now! (Maybe <showalbumartistsonly> would be more straightforward? Or it's just me? )

Anyway, works like a charm ... thnx for the help.

[jmarshall]

I'm thinking of just popping that one in the GUI now anyway.

And it'll be "Show only album artists in artists list".

[jmarshall]

Done in r15536.

It's actually "Hide artists who appear only on compilations"

[the_norm]

Maybe explaining the terminology somewhere? (since it's not standardized properly)

Say something like...

XBMC uses three types of "artists":

TRACK ARTIST: the "artist" of a single track, what is most commonly called "artist" by various software and stored in ARTIST (TPE1) field.

ALBUM ARTIST: the "artist" of the album. What is commonly stored in BAND field (TPE2) or in ALBUM ARTIST field (which one does XBMC use anyway? I have my music tagged with both to be compatible with everything...). If all the tracks of an album have the same track artist then TRACK ARTIST=ALBUM ARTIST. If ALBUM ARTIST=“various artists“, then XBMC will treat the album as a compilation and will list it in compilations. (maybe allowing users to add a list of ALBUM ARTIST values for which the album is treated as compilation? I know I'd like that…). This tag reduces "clutter" and acts as a container for whole albums: without it every artist from every compilation will be listed as a separate artist in the artist list and only act as a container for one or two songs.

COMPILATION ARTIST: a special case of TRACK ARTIST. Denotes the TRACK ARTIST that is different from ALBUM ARTIST.

… a taxonomy of these and similar terms could help in options, manual and music organization of XBMC users in general simply to avoid the use of organizationally imprecise terms (since there is no metadata stored on the level of album (which sucks) what does "artist" actually refer to? ).

I'm completely new here, so if I missed this somewhere or if this discussion is old news for you guys just ignore...

Cheers

[jmarshall]

Hi the norm, and welcome to the forums.

Yes, that's pretty much it. TPE1 is always used as the track artist. TPE2 is used as the band artist, though ALBUM ARTIST is also read, and probably takes priority.

And yes, only "Various Artists" (in the users' locale) is used as a test for compilations, in addition to the itunes TCMP field (similar for mp4) which currently sets the ALBUM_ARTIST field to "Various Artists" if available.

XBMC in addition splits an artist (or album artist) field based on the "separator" defined in advancedsettings.xml, which defaults to " / ".

If no album artist is specified, XBMC checks the tracks on that album that lie in the same folder. If all primary artists (first artist before the separator) are in agreement, then it's tagged as a single artist album, possibly with featured artists if there are secondary artists. If one or more primary artists differ, then it's considered a compilation, and the album artist is again set to "Various Artists".

Ideally sho will add this to the online manual (or create a place for me to copy it in

Cheers,
Jonathan

[sho]

As I am not very knowledgeable on the subject, I just dumped it here:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Preparing_yo...rtist_Tags
It needs cleaning up.