Support and General Use > Audio Playback, Database and Playlists

workarounds for 'album artist' & 'disc number'

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alfred:
i'd like to share my workaround for the missing album artist and discnumber support with you. all you need is a rockbox player and foobar2000. i have my files tagged with album artist either when there are various artists on one disc or when the artist features other artists on some tracks (this information is stored in my (track) artist fields). the result ist that rockbox has an all too full artist list. i use the composer field for my workaround to get a list that consists only of album artists and 'various artists'

- when your player is connected, add the music directory to a new fb2k playlist. DO NOT RUN THE SCRIPTS ON YOUR LOCAL FILES, ONLY ON YOUR PLAYERS HD!
- select all tracks
- context menu -> tagging -> manage scripts
- select 'format value from other fields'
- destination: composer, string: $if(%album artist%,%album artist%,%artist%) --> if album artist exists, write album artist to composer, else write artist

if you have discnumbers, add the following to the script:
- format value from other fields
- destination: album, string: %album%[ - cd %disc%] --> if disc number exists, add " - cd 1/2/3" to album title

save this script as e.g. "rockbox tagging" and run it.

in rockbox, re-initialize tag cache and reboot.

voila:

the composer menu (which you can rename to album artist now) contains a list of the album artists including 'various artists'. the discs of multidisc albums are seperated into different folders which can now be added to playlists in the correct order instead of having 1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3...

if you add new albums, simply run the saved script which can be found in the context menu now. ONLY do so AFTER you have copied them to your player! better create a new playlist and add the directories from the player to be sure.

i've also some scripts for file copying to my player installed, which makes fb2k the only prog i need for music file management.

if you have got other solutions or suggestions for improvement, please post!

cu,
alfred

Rincewind:
That's a nice workaround. I might be tempted to use TagCache again with this.

alfred:
it's become easier to use this workaround since cwbowron has released a new version of his sendtodevice-component for foobar which can apply any context menu entries on files after copying (you can set up a path definition using TAGZ). so the tag cache trick can now be applied automatically. this is very comfortable especially if the files have been copied to various directories.

http://wiki.bowron.us/index.php/Foobar2000:SendToDevice
(the easiest way to transfer your music to any dap anyway, imho)

cu,
alfred

danhibiki:
You can use (test) this patch for disc number support in TagCache:
http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/4961

;)

But you'll need to continue using your album artist hack, so it may not be so useful :(

I don't have many "various artists" albums, so I never felt this need, but I may take a look into it and maybe create a patch to it...

Rincewind:
I only have about 10-15 albums with Various Artists, but they are enough to let me stay with folder view (the workaround doesn't work for me now because I'm using linux and no foobar2000 anymore  :-[).
50 artists in the tag database view that only have one or two tracks are really annoying for me, because I usually listen to whole albums. So I would really like to have album artist support in Rockbox!

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