Omitting VA discs from Album / Artist view -> instead: Options

[buppelupp]

I'd love an alternative Album / Artist view that omitted all the artists belonging to Various Artists Album (Mixtapes / Collections / Soundtracks etc)

These artists just clog up my list of artists and makes it unnecessary long.
This view could also instead generate entries like "VA - Album title". This way all the artists belonging on on VA disc won't be scattered all over the place.


Or does anyone know a way to create a filter that would do the same?

This post has been edited by buppelupp: Feb 7 2008, 17:10

[cmdrpaddy]

I'd love an alternative Album / Artist view that omitted all the artists belonging to Various Artists Album (Mixtapes / Collections / Soundtracks etc)

These artists just clog up my list of artists and makes it unnecessary long.
This view could also instead generate entries like "VA - Album title". This way all the artists belonging on on VA disc won't be scattered all over the place.


Or does anyone know a way to create a filter that would do the same?

Is that for the default user interface playlist?

I use

CODE

$if(%album artist%,%album artist%,%artist%) - %date% - %album% $if(%discnumber%,'('Disc %discnumber%')',)

as a custom grouping scheme.

I think the same code should work for other things.

[drbeachboy]

Your IF statement for album artist & artist is unnecessary. Just plain ol' %album artist% will do the exact same thing.

[Matt Schuette]

@buppelupp
The above suggestion works very well assuming you use the Album Artist tag on your VA albums and set it to something like VA or Various Artists. If it wasn't clear, %album artist% gets you %artist% if no album artist is set. %track artist% is sometimes useful too... check out the Titleformat Reference for more on arguably, one of fb2k's most powerful features.

[buppelupp]

@buppelupp
The above suggestion works very well assuming you use the Album Artist tag on your VA albums and set it to something like VA or Various Artists. If it wasn't clear, %album artist% gets you %artist% if no album artist is set. %track artist% is sometimes useful too... check out the Titleformat Reference for more on arguably, one of fb2k's most powerful features.

Would it be possible to make Foobar figure it out by letting it assume that any album containing let's say 4 different artists or more most likely is a VA album, then make it display those albums in the artist view as "VA - [Composer] - [AlbumName]" or just "VA - [AlbumName] ? Then you wouldn't have to muck around with tags or anything. This could be an alternative view to the default one, and it would seriously clean up the Artist / Album pane. As it is now I scroll through hundreds of artists that only have one track connected to them and it isn't very practical.

[Yotsuya]

Would it be possible to make Foobar figure it out by letting it assume that any album containing let's say 4 different artists or more most likely is a VA album

How exactly are you tagging your songs that are part of VA albums? Most popular tagging schemes use %album artist% for this and you could probably use something like this to get around the tag auomapping:
[$if($meta(album artist),VA,%artist%) - ]%album%

Do you have multiple artists separated by a delimeter in the same tag? Do you have multiple artist tags per song? AFAIK there is no way for foobar to compare more than one file and decide if an album is a VA album or not.

[buppelupp]

Would it be possible to make Foobar figure it out by letting it assume that any album containing let's say 4 different artists or more most likely is a VA album

How exactly are you tagging your songs that are part of VA albums? Most popular tagging schemes use %album artist% for this and you could probably use something like this to get around the tag auomapping:
[$if($meta(album artist),VA,%artist%) - ]%album%

Do you have multiple artists separated by a delimeter in the same tag? Do you have multiple artist tags per song? AFAIK there is no way for foobar to compare more than one file and decide if an album is a VA album or not.

Well, at the moment I've got the both artist and title (artist - title) in the title field and then VA - Album name in the album field. I'm not sure I'm happy I did that right now cos it's a horrible job reverting it back.