[mythtv-users] 0.25 Music

[Christopher Kerr]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 12:15 AM, Scott & Nicole Harris
<snharris99 at live.com> wrote:
>>Well it's good to know that it's not MythMusic that is broken :) You
>>might just have a bad build which will clear itself up if you update
>>again I believe the library version change or something like that was
>>causing a few problems.
>
> Yeah, I still think I'll wait until Mythbuntu 12.04.  I like to do fresh
> installs to get rid of any "cruft" from my experimentation in between
> upgrades.  It works out nicely that it and 0.25 will be coming out around
> the same time.
>
>>> I think I would still prefer an option to have the tree (whenever I
>>>can actually get it to work) simply display my folder hierarchy, though.
>
>>Well that currently isn't possible. While it would be relatively easy to
>>add another node to the tree that allowed that I think the consensus of
>>opinion was to encourage everyone to add sane metadata to there tracks
>>rather than rely on the tracks filename.
>
> That's the thing, I do have sane metadata in all my music.  I go to great
> lengths to make sure I do when I import it (which was a big time killer on
> the initial import).  However, my preference is to present my music by
> artist....mostly.  It tends to break down with "various artist" albums where
> you end up having some unknown session artist (say from a sound track) in
> the list with one song under their name.  I accommodated this by adding a
> "various artists" folder to my hierarchy and sanely organizing those types
> of albums in there.

Whilst I don't use Mythmusic (prefer Squeezeslave + control from iPad
with iPeng) I obviously have the same issue with my music collection.

My solution was to make use of a different field - "Album Artist". So
for various artists albums I populate that field with something sane -
the album name, or an artists name if it were a cover album, or
occasionally I abuse it as a genre field (Soundtracks, Musicals). So
"Triple J Like a Version" has the Album Artist "Triple J", "He Will
Have His Way - The Songs of Neil and Tim Finn" is filed under Neil
Finn, and "Les Miserables - 10th Anniversary" is under "Musicals".

Then I browse by Album Artist->Album instead of Artist->Album, so all
the various artist albums are neatly contained, but not uselessly
lumped together under "Various Artists". Because I retain the original
artist values though, I can still find the Evermore track on the first
album, the Jimmy Barnes track on the second, and find the third under
"Original London Cast" should the need arise.

I don't know if this is possible in Mythmusic, I haven't checked out a
recent version, but you might be able to adapt the idea.

- Chris