RE: xPLMediaNet - How to deal with Various Artist Albums

["Tony Tofts" <tony@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>  However, I do have a few albums that are in my "various"
> folder that only have three different artists - each of which
> has more than 3 tracks per artist.

I said theyre'd be an exception, just hadn't expected it so soon ;-)

> Problem A) sounds like you are not keeping tracks tied to
> their albums other than by album name, which sounds more
> dangerous than just the possibility of erroneously tagging
> them as various - doesn't the database currently have a
> method to stop the tracks from same-named albums becoming mixed up?

The database is flat, so every track record has every piece of information.

But more pertinent to the issue at hand is a hash value for album/artist to
uniquely identify the album, but of course a various artist album with 12
artists gets tagged as 12 unique albums... This is the problem

What I need is to be able to make some kind of assumption regarding what
constitutes an album of various artists

The obvious choice is the path to the tracks on the album (consider it the
album path)?

E.g. if I could assume that if the tracks for an album are all in a single
folder it means it is a single album, and therefore that if those tracks
are
for multiple artists it is a 'various album' then most issues are resolved

The problem is I've always tried to avoid this kind of assumption, since
some users might just keep all their mp3's in a single folder or spread out
all over the place...

I think the answer might be to process as follows:

Check for album vs artist to see if more than 1 artist matches any given
album name:

If it doesn't (and this should be the majority for most people) then treat
it as a unique album for a single artist

If it does then use the paths to identify the unique albums, and then for
each set of tracks in these folders see if there is a single artist or
multiple artists

Thoughts?

Thanks
Tony



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