[All] To build a better music player

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Actually, if you only use ID3 info, it's very difficult to do a good job
>> of sorting files: it's basically impossible to reliably figure out which
>> songs are part of the same album and which aren't.  You can use
> I've solved all those problems the first times I opened amarok, and
> now it's a  pleasure searching for some song, artist, disk, track...
>> heuristics which will work OK in many cases, but sooner or later you'll
>> bump into some songs whose "album" tag says (say) "Anthology" and which
>> are really divided into 4 different albums, some of which are "well
> When you find one, you can allways change track's id3 :)

Except that those ID3 tags have a clear meaning, and "fixing them" to
get the sorting to work may imply "breaking them" in the sense that the
info they carry is not quite correct any more.
Tho, I guess it depends on the details: in which way did you change the
ID3 info to solve such problems?

>> behaved" (same artist and year for all their songs), and the others are
>> compilations where every song has a different year/genre/artist.
> Sorting by name has also problems.

No doubt.

> If you have songs from several disks or a double album in the same
> folder, you  can finish with this playlist:

> - track 1, disk 1
> - track 1, disk 2
> ...
> - track 1, disk n
> - track 2, disk 1
> - track 2, disk 2
> ...

I name them "<DISK>-<TRACK> <TITLE>" and it works great ;-)

>> sorting "by file name" really turns out to be a very good solution.
> Not for me ;)

Because you find "changing ID3 tags" to be simpler than "changing
file names".

> I still think that offering several sortings is the way to go

Well, ... it's more work.
An algorithm that uses both ID3 tags and filenames (mostly just
directory names, actually) should be able to accomodate all situations.



        Stefan