Blank artist in album "soup" view

I don't know if this is a bug or not but I've noticed that the "Artist" field in the album "soup" view is blank for all of my MP3s. If I drill down into the album listing the artist is always listed. Is this a bug?

I do not see this behavior in Beta 7 or the (internal-alpha-team-only) Beta 8. Which version of the software are you using? Have you tried rebooting and looking again?

Are you sure you're not just looking at tracks which have no artist field filled out? For example, duplicate tracks on the player (check the FID column to find out)?

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the quick response. I should have provided a few more details. First off, I am using 2.0b7. I have only had my player for a little over a week but I have been scouring the BBS and riocar.org to get as much information as possible.

I just tried rebooting the player and I am still seeing the behavior I described. Just to be sure I am explaing this well, I open up Emplode and connect to the player (using the ethernet connection). I click on the Albums view and I get a list of all my albums. But only the "Title" and "Source" fields contain any information.

If I pick any album name at random and double-click on it, I get a list of all the songs on that album and all the fields have information in them.

-- Dave

Okay. I see what you're saying.

The columns which do not apply to a given view (for example if you are only listing album names and not giving complete details) have nothing in them.

I think they should either gray out or hide those columns in that case. I'll drop that in as a bug report. Thanks.

You're welcome. One thing to consider though is that in the Albums view, it might be nice to be able to see the artist as well. This would help in situations where you have albums with the same title by more than one artist ("Greatest Hits" titles are a good example).

I don't know if this is possible but it might be something to consider for a future version. Otherwise I agree with you about graying out or hiding...

-- Dave

This would help in situations where you have albums with the same title by more than one artist

This is precisely why the column doesn't show it. Because you can have an album populated by multiple artists (such as movie soundtracks). So the artist field is, specifically, invalid for that particular view.

Ahh - I get it. Thanks!

It's very easy to show the artist field only if all entries match and show "various" if there is a mismatch between all tracks with the same source.

Likewise it would be nice to get all the track times added together and displayed in the Duration field. You could even do averages for bitrate and the year can be handled the same as my suggestion for artist.

Of course, Soup views are going to run into problems when you get two (or more) albums with the same name by different artists. In its current implementation you just get everything lumped into 1 album. I leave it up to the empeg guys to figure out how to handle this. To be fair, I don't think I have any two albums with the same name right now.

Bruno

I leave it up to the empeg guys to figure out how to handle this.

Oh, cheers

To be fair, I don't think I have any two albums with the same name right now.

In which case, you should rush out and buy the superb albums Substance by Joy Division, and also Substance by New Order (who, admittedly, are arguably the same band).

Peter

It's very easy to show the artist field only if all entries match

No. It's not.

Likewise it would be nice ... Duration field.

This code is in emplode already. It's disabled, because it's too damn slow.

Leave it up to one of you guys to prove me wrong... Actually... Oops, I USED to have Substance by JoyDivision on tape. Haven't replaced it with CD yet. So I'm still right. I think.

I'm waiting for Drakino to throw up some type of music listing feature on Roicar (he mentioned it to me a while back). Then you can see that I have a large percentage of pretty cool stuff.

Bruno

No. It's not.

Yes it is.

Bruno

Well, given a program that's not already as established as empode (which may have issues with trying to throw this type of feature in after-the-fact), it's not too hard a parse to implement. Like the track time additions, it would probably slow things down. I should have qualified the statement - I didn't mean to say it would be easy to put it into the existing emplode code base.

Now get back to work.

Bruno