How to browse by albumartist with rhythmbox or any other gnome musicplayer?

Question

Rhythmbox offers (as it should by now!) the metatag "albumartist" in addition to "artist". But I don't see any way to browse by this property.

The offered views are: Browse by "artist - album", "genres - artist", "genre - artist - album".

How can another view like "genre - albumartist - album" be added? (this is the way itunes sorts, makes a lot of sense if you have about 220 compilation albums with a lot of "one hit wonder"-artists!)

Can't be that difficult, can it?

In case it's impossible, - is it possible to completely replace rhythmbox with another application that's able to do the above (which one?)?

thx for reading, piedro

Solution 1

This is a bug in Rhythmbox.

As for alternatives, Banshee is very popular, so you could give this a try. I don't use it so I can't give you my experience of it but I hear it has the feature you want.

Solution 2

CoverArt Browser

The Rhythmbox plugin CoverArt Browser provides for this ability - to browse by Album Artist:

This is in a tree view - the first column shows Album Artist Pictures - the branch shows the albums for that artist.

The plugin also provides for the ability to filter by genre/decades/ratings/track artists

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To install, use my PPA and the package rhythmbox-plugin-coverart-browser as described in the linked Q&A:

• How do I install third-party rhythmbox plugins?

Comments

[johnc]

I'm also trying out Guayadeque, new to the 10.10 repository (but available on 9.10 and 10.04 - linuxtree.blogspot.com/2010/06/…). Very happy so far.

[Kervin Ramen]

thx for your comments!

[Kervin Ramen]

I tried both: Banshee has the same flaw as lond as I can remember. I wonder: Doesn't it drive you nuts that ripping your "Kill Bill" soundtrack messes up your nice collection with artists like "[dialog]", "[No Artist]", "13 Cats" ...

[Kervin Ramen]

Guayadeque is the way to go I guess it's just not finished yet. There's a lot of problems for me when importing my whole library and after that there's a lot of information missing that I have to fill in somehow again (nice musicbrainz support btw!) ... things like missing title length after importing some VBR-compressed files ... there's a lot still to do but they will sort it out, I'm sure. Just takes some time. But rhythmbox is around like ages and many people asked for albumartist sorting/browsing just I can't find a solution. the tag is there! - has to be very easy ... thx, p.

[Chris J.T. Auld]

The correct bug is bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318579

[Kervin Ramen]

The dark side of opensource development: this bug is discussed for 4(!) years now ... now we hve verion2.9.7 but it's still not changed ... well done, rhythmbox, well done ...

[Brian Z]

Banshee has now corrected this issue in more recent versions. But aside from the CoverArt plugin workaround mentioned in another answer, it's still a problem in Rhythmbox 3.0.2.