Compilations

[t0m]

wonder why this feature wasn’t yet requested?!

From TwonkyVision MusicServer v2.7 Documentation:

Compilations are music collections like “Best of rock 2004”, which contain a number of songs from different artists. Therefore – if sorted by artist, one compilation CD would lead to as much artist entries as songs on the CD – and each of these artist entries would contain exactly one song. To prevent the cluttering of the database with lots of such single entries it is necessary to identify compilations. When identified the MediaServer will add these compilations to the album tree, but for artists just adds the album under the artist “various”. Compilations can be identified via the iTunes library – as iTunes marks compilations with a specific flag, or they can be stored under a special folder in your content directory[…]

[rpedde]

Perhaps because it’s already implemented?

Unless you are telling me that you have songs tagged as compilations that aren’t showing up as compilations.

But I’m filing this one as “Works For Me” ™.

— Ron

[rpedde]

Here’s what the code looks for:

in m4a files, the atom is called “cpil”

in id3v2.2, it’s YTCP, and in 2.3+ it’s TCMP.

Anyway, using a id3v2 tagger like “id3v2”, you should be able to do:

id3v2 –TCMP 1

That should do it. You could do that for just a few songs on the album… The compilation tag is on a per-song basis.

— Ron

[rpedde]

Okay… now I get it — automatically tagging songs as compilations if they sit under a particular folder name, like “various” or “soundtracks”, or “various artists”.

Come to think of it, even an artist name like “various artists” might be another indicator — I have some soundtracks that I initially tagged as “xxx soundtrack”/”various artists”.

Hrm. That’s actually a good idea.

[t0m]

rpedde wrote:

Perhaps because it’s already implemented?

Ups.. didn’t realized that..

Anyway, using a id3v2 tagger like “id3v2”, you should be able to do:

hmm.. I only found http://id3v2.sourceforge.net/
which is not able to set a TCMP or YTCP tag.

Okay… now I get it — automatically tagging songs as compilations if they sit under a particular folder name, like “various” or “soundtracks”, or “various artists”.

Exactly!

/t0m

[t0m]

btw. neither TCMP nor YTCP are covered in the standard:

http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames.txt

/t0m

[rpedde]

how peculiar. I didn’t actually test it, I just assumed that:

You can set the value for any id3v2 frame by using '--' and then frame id

For example:

id3v2 --TIT3 "Monkey!" file.mp3

meant that you could set the value for any id3v2 frame by using — and then frame id.

My mistake. (?!?!?!)

So I guess I have no idea what you would use to set that flag. I guess all mine are in iTunes, and I use that. How strange.

[rpedde]

Nope, the soundbridge doesn’t do anything with the compilation flag.

http://www.rokulabs.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2230

Which is kind of strange… It’s hard to read between the lines of Roku’s NDA’d statements, but he seems to be saying that there isn’t a way to ask for the compilation flag, but there sure is — it’s daap.songcompilation. I’m not sure what he’s getting at in his answer.

Anyway, you’ll find that when using iTunes against mt-daapd, you’ll see compilations expressed correctly, but not with a soundbridge as a client.

That’s a soundbridge thing, and they are aware of it.

— Ron

[rpedde]

Come to think of it… one option for this might be to lie about the artists. maybe an option to change the artist name on compilation to “Various Artists” or something.

Maybe even stuff the original artist name into comments. Something like that. What do you think?

[rpedde]

Actually, that’s borderline doable. Browsing by artists, the artists could be dummied up easily enough:

select distinct artists from songs where compilation=0 union select "Various Artists"

That one would be easy to fix up.

Then when you select “Various Artists”, the soundbridge does two queries… one for all albums where artist = “Various Artists”, and one for all songs where artist=”Various Artists”

That would take some uglier fixups. It would be doable, though. It might in fact be worth doing. I might play with that.

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