the spirit is weak. woe be the spirit. the body is weaker still. Siërra R
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ask me about horses
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somewhere on website league
username will be botflymother
really if you wanna find me just look for botfly mother
gonna keep that name around for a good while

my most controversial opinion is there is never a valid reason to use "Various Artists" as an album artist name. use the name of the entity that released it, or use the title of the release if it wasnt released by an entity. why the fuck would you want to group every compilation together regardless of whats on them. fucking bullshit standard

also the Album Artist tag should just be called Artist, and what is currently called Artist should be Track Artist. or at least make Album Artist the default sort. why the fuck would you want an album to be split up into multiple artists in your library. why is that every music players default (and often only) artist sort

semi-related: worst part of having a linux phone is not having Black Player EX. best music program i have ever used on any platform. if you use android and have a music collection, i can not recommend the paid version of black player enough. free version is also very good but the paid is so incredibly worth it and the dev deserves all of your money anyways


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in reply to @botflymother's post:

Various artists is an artifact of a time when it was unusual to download an entire album worth of material, as the assumed use case for downloadable music was for singles.

Album artist didn't exist in initial ID3 tags, or at least the common ripping platforms didn't support it in any easy way that most users used it. Since no software can guarantee that the majority of users don't have their music meticulously tagged, various artists became a shorthand code for "group these songs with different artists but on the same album together"

in the era of custom vorbis tags, the need to group like that shouldn't exist, but the vast majority of software doesn't recognize custom tags. Sure I can make foobar2000 display and group based on a number of custom tags, but I can't tell Plex or BluOS to use those tags because they don't know they exist, and that will always be the case.

Various artists is 25 years of tech/information debt.

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