Some of us edit the Album Artist field to "pull out" certain artists from the (Multiple Artist) Tile. I want to see all of Bob Dylan's tracks in the Bob Dylan Album Artist/ Album Artist (auto) Tile.
This change is a HUGE problem for me. I can keep albums together on disk and in MC but I want to edit compilations because MC buries those tracks in Multiple Artists when I am browsing Artists.
The key, the whole key, and nothing but the key – so help me Codd.Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd – the father of relational database systems and the relational model. MC is not based on a relational database but a database it is, and very much so. Therefore an analysis of information to be stored in MC, its categorization scheme (e .g. the keys), and how that information will be used and searched in your own case may be worth a though. Given a large and varying material, the design task (e. g. what keys to use, and what values to assign to them) need not to be simple.
If I understand you correctly Dr. C., you would like to:
For a selected artist display all albums containing at least one track where at least one of track artists is the selected one. The display should not depend on Album Artist of the albums, only on the track artists. Well, that would be nice to have. I don’t know whether it is possible in MC but let analyze what MC would have to do in order to implement this.
First MC would have to produce a list of all artists including individual track artists – a non-duplicate union of all artists appearing in MC database. How about tracks with more than one artist, e. g. Tina Turner and Eros Ramazzotti in Cose Della Vita?
Next, for each artist on above list, MC would have to find all tracks where Album Artist or (track) Artist contains that artist. Then for each such track MC would have to get corresponding Album and prepare a non-duplicate union of all such albums. This list of albums is your result.
Yes, please, do! But then I would like to display all albums where at least one track is “Blues” that was composed or recorded before 1950. Or how about displaying all artists that played together with… etc., etc.? The search requirements could be endless. Some of this you can achieve by playlists with expressions but not all of it.
The point is that the Panes, Genre, Artist, Album views of the “Audio” node are predefined queries that result in what people would normally expect, that is, what people normally call Genre, Artist and Album. For some people that have their material structured in some unusual way such predefined views will not work well but playlists may.
Then again, if database material is structured and categorized in a way that is unsuitable for the search/query/grouping that you need then no matter how intelligent the database system is, you will not get what you want.
/Mikael