Group compilation tracks into a virtual "Various" or "Compilations" artist.

[Raphael0]

Hi, just a quick note to say that I really enjoy this app and am especially mindful of its simplicity. The feature request I describe here would not add clutter to the app, but is in my view one of few missing essential features for Museeks to be used as one’s main music player. Thanks for taking the time to read, and if this issue should be moved to discussions I can do this!

Feature description:

Support for « compilation » albums

• In artists view, instead of being ordered with the artist, tracks which are part of a compilation (tag COMPILATION == 1) are shown as part of a new « Compilations » entry at the bottom of the artist view, where they are ordered by album (chronologically or alphabetically)
• When viewing the compilations, next to each compilation album, an additional third column with the track’s artist is shown (between the track title and track length)
  This is how compilations are managed in most music players, e.g. iTunes.

Why this could matter to the user:

Currently compilation albums don’t show as a single album.
This means that:

1. Compilation albums cannot be viewed or listened to as a single album, as they should be
2. The artist view is cluttered by numerous artists (sometimes less known), often with only one track

Why this wouldn’t clutter the app:

It is a background feature, invisible if one doesn’t have compilation albums in his/her music library, and can significantly clean up one’s library if so. Especially, it would organise albums they way they should be.

[martpie]

Hey @Raphael0, thank you for the feedback!

That's an interesting topic. The way I see it is it should be solved via an Album view, wdyt? The Compilation bit is an interesting workaround too, I'll need to sleep on it to think if we want to go this way or not.

The artist view is cluttered by numerous artists (sometimes less known), often with only one track

Yeah I think that's kind of the curse of all players, no?

[Raphael0]

Wow, thanks for the fast reply!

I cannot disagree that an album view would be a very nice additional way of displaying compilation albums :) But the way I see it, it would be important that they are also addressed in the artist view to avoid the artist cluttering (and for consistency / users that prefer the artist view).

Yeah I think that's kind of the curse of all players, no?

So what e.g. Apple Music does by default, and what I would also suggest, is to group compilation albums under this "compilations" artist, and concerned tracks are then only shown there. This means that artists that only appear in your compilations (meaning you don't have individual songs/albums of that artist in your library) will not appear in the artist list, but only within the "compilations" entry. This is by design, and you end up with a "cleaner" artist view. Importantly, this also means that artists for which you have regular albums, but which also appear in a compilation, won't have individual tracks from the compilations cluttering their album list, which I would also find a more elegant solution.

I would also argue that it makes it more intuitive and closer to what a physical music collection would look like (compilation albums are not split into tracks, but still have to be sorted somewhere), but I guess that's a very subjective statement.

In any case, these are my thoughts. Thanks for sharing your app with the world!

[martpie]

Apple Music does by default,

do you have some screen to share? Are you talking about the desktop or mobile version? Also, is it about local files or streaming files?

[martpie]

Nevermind, just found it, it's called "Various".

That's an interesting take, let me think about how I could make it work, that would probably mean we need to add a new column for tracks in the DB and we need to backfill it, annoying but do-able. The we can query artists by grouping track artists and filtering out compilation, I need to check if I can detect this flag as well.

Overall LGTM, just gotta do it and see how much can we build without breaking everything (the Museeks DB is like the UI: extremely simple, to not say simplistic).

[Raphael0]

This is still a bit different, in your picture the ALBUMARTIST tag for the album is probably "Various", so it gets grouped into this "artist", and Apple Music automatically shows artist names under each track if there is more than one for the album. There are different conventions for the ALBUMARTIST tag of compilation albums (Various Artists, Various, Compilation...).

For albums using the compilation tag it looks like this on Apple Music:

Regular album for comparison (no artist shown for individual tracks):

Using the COMPILATION tag might be the cleanest, but a more simple (to code) solution could be to push users towards using the ALBUMARTIST to group compilations like in the example you showed (already possible, simply stick to the same tag entry for all compilations, like "Various Artists"). For that it would be nice to then show each track's ARTIST in a new column if they are different than the ALBUMARTIST (otherwise the actual artist never appears), but that would then apply to all albums since compilations are not explicitly differentiated. I wouldn't check for ALBUMARTIST being e.g. "Various Artists" to apply this view selectively, as then issues of language and naming conventions arise.

Another argument for using the COMPILATION tag is that the feature would be more easily understandable to users and maybe more discoverable (if a "This is part of a compilation" check mark is added in the edit menu, which would toggle the tag)

[martpie]

Ah interesting, so I don't have any compilation in my library then. 😅

Could you send me a zip with at least two albums of compilations? You can find my email on my profile page :)

[Raphael0]

Oh looks like it! :)
And sure, I can send them tonight when I'm out of work