Bug 259665

Are you really using the 2.3.1-git branch? Current git is 2.4

actually yesterday I was using both in an attempt to rescue my collection without having to do a full rescan because after compiling the latest 2.4 git Amarok would not complete a scan (stopping at 50% and 99%). But after a full-rescan (forget which version full scan was done in) both versions 2.3.60 (from opensSuse playground repo) and 2.4 (from git) the singles with no cover showed in "various artists" which was different then the day before the full scan when I was running 2.4git.

I fixed it by adding a dummy album tag to all the singles, so the problem for me was solved. I reported it because I didn't know if this different, for me, behavior was intended or not as part of the rewrites

Thank you for the fast feedback.

I can confirm this bug for amarok 2.4-beta1 and 2.4-git version of today. It first occured to me after I deleted the album field from some tracks and those tracks got "lost", until I found them in Various Artists. After deleting all amarok config files und doing a full rescan all my tracks with empty album fields went to the Various Artists.

Confirmed by comment #4

I'm not sure if this is any help, but when I look at my database, the albums table only has one row with an empty name. In previous version there were always multiple albums with an empty name. Each for a unique artist.
I think the new collection scanner doesn't check for a unique album-artist row in the database.

albums table:
id 	name 	artist 	image
3643 	  	NULL 	NULL

Changing component to Collection based on comment #6

Hi,

there were in fact some changes.

1. you already noticed: We have an actual default album with no title. No album means that they go in there.

2. If you sort by album or album artist (or album and then artist which is the same internally) then the tracks without an album artist will appear under "various artists".

Actually we need to fix something with the configuration of the browser view. It's confusing.

RE: "2. If you sort by album or album artist (or album and then artist which is the same internally) then the tracks without an album artist will appear under
"various artists"."

But I don't want them there, I'd like them under the artist - how does a track by an artist belong under "various artists"? Why is this not configurable? Why is this different than previous releases of Amarok?

RE: the use of "album artist" - 
1) Can you tell me which KDE rippers fill the "album artist" tag? 
2) As this is a tag not used in prior releases of Amarok (correct?) the use of it now is going to cause lots of collection issues for people when they perform a full rescan.

There is some confusion here.

The only thing that was changed is the following:
There is only one album without a title and that is a kind of default album compilation.

Previously that was different. There were many albums without title. They could have an album artist or not and they even could have a cover.

So previously your single was in such a no-name album and if you were lucky it got the album artist set to the artist.
This no-name album is displayed together with the other albums under the artist name.

The new logic is different. There is only one album without a title and that is a compilation that can never have a cover.
So all tracks being in that album get displayed under "various artists" together with all the other compilations.

The "album artist" won't save you from that.
(and by the way, album artist is usually the track artist. You don't need to set it by hand).

Back to your issue.
You want tracks without an album title to be handled as if they are in an unnamed album from the track artist.

I think that is quite sensible unless you sort by "album" and then "artist" as second level.
In such a case you would suddenly have all those "fake" albums displayed at the top of the list.


Anyway, I see only one real bug: If you sort by "artist/album" then it's really by "album artist/album".

If tracks with no album tag are given an arbitrary pseudo album tag called "unknown album" or "single tracks" then  wouldn't that be a reasonable solution?

Hello,
This is how I like to use amarok and this new implementation doesn't make ANY sense to me.
I have my collection browser sorted (genre)-artist-album.
When I browse my local collection and see a artist  of which I would like to listen to their music I right click and add or reload to playlist.

The disadvantages of this new implementation are:
-I have to scroll a list of artist twice
-Various Artist>Unknown-album is not sorted in any way. This makes browsing impossible.
-Songs which do not have an album tag never get loaded to the playlist. because the show up under Various and not original artist. 
-When I have one album of an artist I know i wanna listen to (searing with filter) and some separate song I need to load the album first, and then add the separate songs to the play list. (this are four clicks or 2 drag actions. This doesn't make any sense.
-Songs by not-well-known-artists of which I do not have a whole album are never played . I will never see them unless I also browse the Unknown album.

Specially the last point is not really "Re-discovering my music".

This new thing this is really not working for me.
If this behavior really becomes final in  >2.4 , this will will be a show stopper for me and Clementine will likely be my new player. Don't get me wrong, I can bear with some bugs, and loved amarok for long time..., I've been using amarok2 since 2.0 beta.

Rindert Vonk - I fixed it by adding a dummy album tag ("unknown album") to all tracks w/o an album tag. For me it was easy as all my "singles" were in a distinct directory but you should be able to this with Puddletag -> Actions -> functions -> replace

*** Bug 263504 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I can only second Rindert Vonk. This is definitely done wrong imho. I have tagged every single track with an cover (idv2 tag) and I'd like to see it when the song is played. That unknown album can't have covers.
The workaround is no solution. I don't want to tag my tracks with an pseudo album as other music players mess up.
Amarok should be able to show the tracks as it was in version 2.3 and older. Actually, I'd like to know what the advantages are with the new system?

I see your pain and I am still not sure how singles are best handled.

The trouble is: A track without an album name: is this a single or is this track in an album where you just haven't filled out the name?

It gets more interesting. If you say: Hey, an album without a name is a single and should be grouped together with all other singles form an artist.
And don't kid yourself. They need to be grouped in one album as various parts of Amarok don't understand it if there are several different albums with the same name and artist.

This leads to other questions:
1. Which is the resulting cover of such a "singles" album?
2. What about "singles" that have actually two tracks on the physical media?

The results of the "old" systems were that several operations like renaming an album or moving tracks around did not update the collection view.


Could you again write how you like tracks without an album name to be handled:
As far as I understand you want them all to be displayed as if they are in a separate one-track album.
A collection sorted by artist/album would then look like this?

ABBA
- Unknown Album
-- Single 1
- Unknown Album
-- Single 2
- Unknown Album
-- Single 3
- Greatest Hits
-- Super Trouper
-- whatever

To me the solution is:

ABBA
- Unknown Album (or singles)
-- Single 1
-- Single 2
-- Single 3

as to cover, it would be a special case where there would be a generic unknown cover for the grouping that would be the same for all artists

I don't see why amarok should support singles. To me there is no difference between an album or a single (and what about EP btw). An album with one track should be handled just as a normal multi-track-album.
I think most 'singles' are actually songs with album missing. 
And what about track that appear both on single and on album? For me amarok doesn't need to have all these details. Don't we have musicbrainz for that?

For me it would like this:
Artist
-AlbumA
--Song1
--Song2
--....
-AlbumB
--Song1
--Song2
--...
-AlbumC
--Song1
-UnknownAlbum
--Song
--Song

I puzzled around with it today and realized why I changed the behaviour at the first place.
(I agree with Rindert by the way)

If every song is in an Album, even with empty album name, then it would look like this if sorted by Album:

Unknown Album
-Artist A
--Single
Unknown Album
-Artist A
--Single
2001 - Unknown Album
-Artist B
--Single1
--Single2
1997 - Unknown Album
-Artist C
--Single
Unknown Album
-Artist D
--Single

I think instead of opening up new albums for single tracks we should rather change the behaviour of the collection tree view.
If selected "artist" as a level it should show single tracks under the artist name.

rengels re comment #19 - no, that's just wrong you'd have an unknown album for every year that there was a track(s) and then if there were 50 unknown album tracks with 30 different years (think Rolling Stones) then there would in the collection view be 30 different "unknown album" groupings in addition to the true album groupings. Unknown albums (singles) need to be handled as a special case not forced to fit in an existing methodology.

That's a classic case of "do what I mean".

Currently the collection browser will display every album in the database on it's own line, which makes a lot of sense as they might have different covers and also different options (like "show under various artists").

If all singles from one artist are collected in one additional unnamed album you get the view that I have illustrated in comment #19.
That was the state of 2.3.

So my proposal:
Tracks without any album title will get into an unnamed compilation (as with 2.4)
However they will be displayed together with the artist if the view is sorted by "artist".
They will displayed under "various artists" if the view is sorted by "album artist".

Would that be acceptable?

imho the problem with #19 is that if collapsed there's a possiblity of a long list of unknown album in the collection list which isn't very useful
unknown album
unknown album
unknown album
unknown album
1999 - unknown album
1999 - unknown album
2001 - unknown album
2002 - unknown album


Sorted by Artist Album
Artist A
- Album Unknown (album cover is a ? for all unknown albums)
-- track 1
-- track 2
-- track 2 (as there could be duplicate tracks with no album tag)
-Album 1
-- track 1
-- track nn
-Album 2
-- track 1
-- track nn
Artist B
.....

Varient of Sorted by Artist Album with Year displayed
Sorted by Album:
- Artist A Unknown Album
-- Date Unknown
--- track 1
--- track 2
--1999
--- track 1
--- track 2
--- track 2 (as there could be duplicate tracks with no album tag)
--2010
--- track 1
--- track 2
--- track 2 (as there could be duplicate tracks with no album tag)
- Artist B Unknown Album
-- Date Unknown
--- track 1
--- track 2
--1999
--- track 1
--- track 2
--- track 2 (as there could be duplicate tracks with no album tag)
--2010
--- track 1
--- track 2
1998 - Album 1
-- track 1
-- track nn
2003 - Album 2
-- track 1
-- track nn
.....

Sorted by Album:
- Artist A Unknown Album
-- track 1
-- track 2
-- track 2 (as there could be duplicate tracks with no album tag)
- Artist B Unknown Album
-- track 1
-- track 2
-- track 2 (as there could be duplicate tracks with no album tag)
Album 1
-- track 1
-- track nn
Album 2
-- track 1
-- track nn
.....

Variant of Sorted by Album:
- Unknown Album Tracks
-- Artist A Unknown Album
--- track 1
--- track 2
--- track 2 (as there could be duplicate tracks with no album tag)
- -Artist B Unknown Album
--- track 1
--- track 2
--- track 2 (as there could be duplicate tracks with no album tag)
Album 1
-- track 1
-- track nn
Album 2
-- track 1
-- track nn
.....

I guess my comment read a bit rude and I apologize for that.
Well, I have lots of singles and have my collection sorted by 1st) Artist and 2nd layer) Album and would expect a behaviour as described in comment #17 and proposed in comment #21, e.g:

Sorted by Artist / Album with year:
Various Artists
- 2010 - Compilation 1
-- Track 1
-- Track 2
- Compilation 2
-- Track 1
-- Track 2

Artist A
- Unknown Album
-- Track 1
-- Track 2
-- Track 3
- 2010 - Album 1
-- Track 1
-- Track 2
- 2008 - Album 2
-- Track 1
-- Track 2

A cover doesn't need to be shown for the unknown album tracks (a big wish would be: make a slide show for them), as long as it's technically possible to show a cover under 'Current Track' in the context pane while playing such a track. Ideally, the cover is read from the id3 tag of the file (but that's another case ;)) or from the database. I think every track is handled by some internal number in the database so a cover should be assignable without adding albums for every single track?.
For a more sophisticated year sorting as proposed by Bill at 'Varient of Sorted by Artist Album with Year displayed' I would add a possibility to sort by year, e.g. Year / Artist / Album to achieve such a result as shown by Bill.

Hi, are there any news on this issue?

If I can express my opinion I am in favor of the solution proposed in the post above, but with the unknown album entry at the end (like in amarok1, btw):

Artist A
- 2010 - Album 1
-- Track 1
-- Track 2
- 2008 - Album 2
-- Track 1
-- Track 2
- Unknown Album
-- Track 1
-- Track 2
-- Track 3
Artist B
...

The issue seems fixed to me with the release of Amarok version 2.5. Could somebody else please comfirm? 

My sorting in 2.5 is now:

Various Artists
- 2010 - Compilation 1
-- Track 1
-- Track 2
- Compilation 2
-- Track 1
-- Track 2

Artist A
- 2010 - Album 1
-- Track 1
-- Track 2
- 2008 - Album 2
-- Track 1
-- Track 2
- Unknown Album
-- Track 1
-- Track 2

This is great news, thank you devs for the new version and especially fixing this bug!

Thank you for the feedback.