"Various artists" albums in local storage appear multiple times in album view

[RanTalbott]

noson 5.3.2 on Ubuntu 20.04

I have about 700 CDs that I've ripped to oggs over the last 20 years. I've used a few different rippers and taggers, so there's some inconsistency in the tagging. About 3000 tracks show up as "" artist in noson.

About 125 CDs, with over 1500 tracks, are in the "Various" artist subdirectory. Many of them show up multiple times in the Albums view, once for each (properly tagged??) artist. Scrolling though 700 albums is already tedious. Having that number doubled or more is a deal-breaker for some.

I understand that there are going to be many artists with album names like "Best Of" or "Greatest hits" that need to be distinguished. Since you're creating the list by navigating a subdirectory tree, could you use the path to distinguish them, instead of just the tags?

I imagine it's been requested before, but a "text only" view without the album covers would be a biig help for navigating through large collections.

Thanks,

Ran

[RanTalbott]

I have an idea for a simple, though imperfect, fix for this problem.

If a track has a numeric track number tag greater than 1, skip the check for a new album, regardless of any artist tag.

This would cause problems if, say, someone disliked track one of the album, and deleted it so it wouldn't come up on a "play the whole album" operation. It wouldn't help if the track files didn't have the track number tags. But it would benefit a lot, probably a majority, of users.

I'm probably going to make this change to my copy. Would you like a pull request if I do?

[janbar]

It should be fixed by the release 5.5.0. To be checked.