Album Artist vs. Artist?

[djp952]

First off, allow me to gush over this software a little. Firefly (using Roku version 1.1b1 at the moment) is simply amazing. I had my doubts and tinkered with a few others while waiting for the SoundBridge to arrive, but your software completely dessimates everyone else’s, including Microsoft Media Player 11 / WMC. It’s blazingly fast, it’s tiny, it’s open source, and most importantly IT JUST WORKS. Well done sir, you are a credit to our profession!

Now, I’m not sure if this request is possible for anything but WMAs, as I’m rather unfamiliar with the ID tags and who does what, but one feature that would really help me out, and maybe some other folks, would be to use the file’s “Album Artist” tag instead of the “Artist” tag when generating the database’s “Artist” information. In our particular case, we have hundreds of “Various Artist” CDs, which lead to a really long set of Artist names in the database, making it difficult to browse.

I was thinking of perhaps some nice simple checkbox in the web interface that flagged a global switch in the code to read Album Artist instead of Artist, when possible. That way people that prefer the true Artist information set are not hindered, but people desiring the simplified Album Artist set can have a slimmer browse list.

Anyway, I really appreciate the time and effort you put into all this, and apologies if this was a dumb request, or even worse, already implemented and I just don’t know how to do it 😉

[Anonymous]

@djp952 wrote:

First off, allow me to gush over this software a little. Firefly (using Roku version 1.1b1 at the moment) is simply amazing. I had my doubts and tinkered with a few others while waiting for the SoundBridge to arrive, but your software completely dessimates everyone else’s, including Microsoft Media Player 11 / WMC. It’s blazingly fast, it’s tiny, it’s open source, and most importantly IT JUST WORKS. Well done sir, you are a credit to our profession!

Now, I’m not sure if this request is possible for anything but WMAs, as I’m rather unfamiliar with the ID tags and who does what, but one feature that would really help me out, and maybe some other folks, would be to use the file’s “Album Artist” tag instead of the “Artist” tag when generating the database’s “Artist” information. In our particular case, we have hundreds of “Various Artist” CDs, which lead to a really long set of Artist names in the database, making it difficult to browse.

I was thinking of perhaps some nice simple checkbox in the web interface that flagged a global switch in the code to read Album Artist instead of Artist, when possible. That way people that prefer the true Artist information set are not hindered, but people desiring the simplified Album Artist set can have a slimmer browse list.

Anyway, I really appreciate the time and effort you put into all this, and apologies if this was a dumb request, or even worse, already implemented and I just don’t know how to do it 😉

It is a great program, isn’t it? I’ve been using it for some time now and it never ceases to amaze me how much better Firefly is at doing what I want done than any other solution I’ve used. And I’ve tried a bunch.

I’m not sure about version 1.1b1. On my version SVN-1586 from the nightlies downloads, on the configuration page, I can select “Show Advanced Conf” and that exposes, among other things, the ability to select “Group Compilations” and then specify the compilations directory (and you don’t have to type in the full path, mine reads “Various Artist”). Once you select that and rescan the library, you’ll find that all of the compilation CDs show up under “Various Artists” and the song titles read “Artist/Title” in the display. Works like a charm!

If you search the forum for compilations, you may find other posts that address this issue. Again, it may not be supported in your version. If so, check out the nightlies.

[djp952]

Doi. That’s …. absolutely …. perfect 😥 (<– It brings a tear to my eye how wonderful this software is)

I apologize for posting in the wrong place, this should have been in the ‘stupid user that didn’t RTFM’ forum!

Thank you VERY much pmorris …

[rpedde]

@djp952 wrote:

Doi. That’s …. absolutely …. perfect 😥 (<– It brings a tear to my eye how wonderful this software is)

I apologize for posting in the wrong place, this should have been in the ‘stupid user that didn’t RTFM’ forum!

Thank you VERY much pmorris …

That’s still not *quite* right, but it kind of hacks around it a bit.

I am collecting album artist, and I want to make a mode that does browsing like you suggest — album artist by preference, or if that’s not present, use artist.

But it’s and ugly sql query and it brings small systems to their knees.

So I am going to defer that until the Great DB Rewrite (Take 3), which should happen Real Soon Now.

‘Course, it’s been about to happen RSN for some time, so…

Getting there… just slowly. 🙂

Thanks for the praise as well.

[djp952]

Just a quick update …

I was kinda bored so I wrote a quick little app to replace all my “Author” tags with the “WM/AlbumArtist” tags (yes, Windows guy here) for everything except my “Various Artists” and “Soundtrack” albums. The result was exactly as expected, and ideal for my situtation. Granted, my author tags are gone, but I’m driving Firefly from a mirror anyway 🙂

It got me thinking … would it be easier for you to provide customization of what tags get used from the files to populate the database rather than give a general catch-all that would only satisfy some folks? For example, if in the Advanced Config I could dictate that “WM/AlbumArtist” be used instead of the default “Author” to populate the SONGS.ARTIST data, that would be that (at least for me). Of course you run into some stickiness with the Compilations, as they could/should be treated differently. In my particular case, I actually DO want “Author” to be used for the Compilations.

Since the default is what most folks are probably looking for anyway, perhaps this could be something that can be added into the FireFly configuration file(s) rather than making it a UI item.

Anyway, I’m good .. extremely happy in fact. Replacing “Author” on the mirror was something I wanted to do anyway since my Sansa has the same habit of not providing an album-centric implementation option.

[rpedde]

@djp952 wrote:

Just a quick update …

I was kinda bored so I wrote a quick little app to replace all my “Author” tags with the “WM/AlbumArtist” tags (yes, Windows guy here) for everything except my “Various Artists” and “Soundtrack” albums. The result was exactly as expected, and ideal for my situtation. Granted, my author tags are gone, but I’m driving Firefly from a mirror anyway 🙂

It got me thinking … would it be easier for you to provide customization of what tags get used from the files to populate the database rather than give a general catch-all that would only satisfy some folks? For example, if in the Advanced Config I could dictate that “WM/AlbumArtist” be used instead of the default “Author” to populate the SONGS.ARTIST data, that would be that (at least for me). Of course you run into some stickiness with the Compilations, as they could/should be treated differently. In my particular case, I actually DO want “Author” to be used for the Compilations.

Since the default is what most folks are probably looking for anyway, perhaps this could be something that can be added into the FireFly configuration file(s) rather than making it a UI item.

Anyway, I’m good .. extremely happy in fact. Replacing “Author” on the mirror was something I wanted to do anyway since my Sansa has the same habit of not providing an album-centric implementation option.

Ya, that’s going to be exposed in a scripting-plugin. A “db add” event will be posted to a script before it gets inserted into the database to allow scripts to munge the tag data before it goes in the db.

I anticipate using ruby, as that seems to be the easiest (besides lua) to integrated into C.

Plus, writing c extensions for ruby is fun. 🙂

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