Add "Album Artists" to root directories

[tkem]

It's already supported in v0.8.0, just needs to be included in the default configuration:

directories =
    Albums              local:directory?type=album
    Album Artists       local:directory?type=artist&role=albumartist
    Artists             local:directory?type=artist
[...]

Some people may prefer it to the way "Artists" are handled, and it might help with support issues, e.g. "artist" tags vs. "albumartist" tags. Note that MPDroid also has a "Use album artists" setting for its local browse configuration.

[tkem]

First, browsing "Album Artists" should give proper "local:album:" URIs...

[tkem]

Also re-think get_distinct vs. browse URIs...

[jaedb]

@tkem I'm particularly interested in this issue as it'll make the Iris frontend a bit more versatile. Has any progress been made on this?

[tkem]

@jaedb: As mentioned initially, this should already be possible (with some quirks, maybe) by manually adding it to the configuration.
Otherwise, no progress on this, since I'm not actively using mopidy-local-sqlite myself any more and nobody else jumped on it. Maybe we should add a "maintainer wanted" sign up there, but that's why this got transferred to the "mopidy" org in the first place, IIRC.

[jaedb]

@tkem a belated follow-up question: if you're not using Mopidy-Local-SQLite, what backend extension are you using?

[tkem]

@jaedb: I've been using mopidy-dleyna with the minidlna media server for the last couple of years.

[amitkeret]

@tkem looking at the source code, it seems that this filter will only display tracks where albumartist is explicitly defined

mopidy-local/mopidy_local/schema.py

Line 69 in 5e6d260

"albumartist": """EXISTS (

therefor, since most single-artist album tracks are unlikely to have this definition, the usability of this filter is questionable.

would it be possible to rewrite this query so it doesn't exclude tracks, but rather reverts to artist field, if no albumartist is defined?
I think this would be more useful; it would mean that compilation albums would be listed based on their albumartist field, and would ALSO list single-artist album tracks as well.

thank you

[tkem]

@amitkeret: It's been some time since I've been using this, but IIRC most tracks (at least the ones I've encountered) will also provide an albumartist tag, which usually matches artist unless it's part of a compilation album.

[amitkeret]

I can confirm that my artist list is significantly filtered if I use role=albumartist, meaning that the tracks do not provide/fallback to providing albumartist tag if this is not explicitly defined
@jodal any ideas?

Mopidy 3.0.2
Mopidy-Local 3.1.1