Album artist sorting

[Sven]

When I sort a playlist on "Album artist, Album, Disc, Track", I first get all the Albums for which I didn't set the Album artist tag sorted by Album, and then the Albums with an Album artist sorted by Album artist and then by Album. Could you change it so that the Album artist sorting option works like:

if albumartist is None:
    albumartist = artist;

[Quentin Sculo]

Yes I'll do it, the only problem is I'd like to keep the possibility of sorting by album_artist, so I need to differentiate between the "raw" album_artist and the virtual "album_artist or artist".
Any suggestions for naming these ?

Currently I can only think of these names :

• album artist (for which one ?)
• raw album artist (not pretty)
• album artist or artist (very long)

long names are especially bad when used in FPanes, as the name is used in the tab, I could use a short name version for these cases.

Currently both fields are named "album artist" but are not available everywhere :

• sorting has only the "raw" one
• columns have both
• FPanes have only the virtual one

[Sven]

Maybe Album Artist and (Album) Artist?

Oh, and happy new year ;)

[berarma]

Maybe:

• Album artist
• Song Artist
• Artist (the virtual one, guessed from the others)

Some places might do well with just the last one, or I could say almost everywhere maybe.

Just my 2 cents.
HNY!

[Quentin Sculo]

Sorry for not replying sooner.
I rather like the suggestion by berarma, but it changes a lot of things, so I'm thinking about it.
As it would change the field currently referred to by "Artist", I would have to make that change in the internal names too. And yes you're right, a lot of places could keep using the artist field with its new meaning, but not all, so I have to think carefully and do some tests.
Also I worry a bit about user expectations, anyone knows of other players that handle "album artist" this way ?

[Sven]

Every player I've seen so far just calls the "Album Artist/Artist" one "Album artist" and the "Artist" one "Artist". They don't have an option to not sort the ones without an album artist set, because it's not very likely that anyone would use it. Doing this would also be the most easy for you I think ;)

[Quentin Sculo]

Just to clarify, I'm not talking about just sorting, but everywhere. It's true that it's not that useful for sorting, but for columns in SongList/SongTree, filtering, and artist lists in FPanes, having the choice between the 2 is much more useful.

[Sven]

I still don't really see when that would be useful. If you have an album of one artist with the album artist tag set, and another that doesn't, then you would you filter on only the album with the album artist tag set, rather than just filtering on the album. Or why would you want a column containing the album artist with a lot of empty space in it, rather than a list that just contains either the artist or the album artist if available.

I'm just trying to save you some work ;)

[BramBonne]

Yes I'll do it, the only problem is I'd like to keep the possibility of sorting by album_artist.

Is there a reason sorting by 'raw' album_artist should be possible? I mean, can you think of  a use case where someone would like all albums without an album artist sorted before those that have an album artist?

By the way, first post here, so: really appreciate your work. Love this application  :)

[Quentin Sculo]

Yes sorting by 'raw' album_artist can be useful in some cases, like seeing which songs have an album_artist defined.
I've made a commit ( http://git.gmusicbrowser.org/commit/0254bc9ccf) that adds sorting by the album artist or artist field, and renamed the field to "Album artist or artist", I'm not very happy about the length of the name, I may change it the future, but there's need to be a clear distinction.

(sorry about taking so long to fix this simple sorting issue)

[BramBonne]

No problem. Still very grateful for this program :-)
Perhaps you could rename the field to "(Album) artist", "Logical artist" or "Defined artist"? Not saying that any of these are good, but maybe they help you find a new name ;-)