All I said was
Itunes has a different concept of Compilations to MB. The actual wording in itunes is
‘Album is a compilation of songs by various artists’
I’ve always known Greatest Hits (or similar) releases to be compilations - even before MusicBrainz.
Discogs for example categorizes them as such.
So does AllMusic
Spotify:
RateYourMusic:
Apple Music (an extension of iTunes in ways)
Services that don’t abide to this rule, YouTube Music and Deezer
Which does seem contradictory considering Apple Music does consider compilations to be a collection of songs previously released on other releases (such as albums, singles, EPs etc) as a compilation
Wasn’t trying to being rude. You asked “So anyway, how can I distinguish between ‘various artists’ compilations and ‘greatest hit’ compilations.” I answered. I agree that it would be cool if there was a way outside of manually ticking each box. When I answered. I didn’t know if you even knew that was a possibility based on your previous statements. I was only trying to help.
It is. @dpr is right in that it’s annoying that the compilation field used by picard does indeed check the box in iTunes because it’s using the compilation field in the tag. But that box is intended only for V/A compilations, not all compilations. Is this an issue on other players?
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Wasn’t trying to being rude. You asked “So anyway, how can I distinguish between ‘various artists’ compilations and ‘greatest hit’ compilations.” I answered. I agree that it would be cool if there was a way outside of manually ticking each box. When I answered. I didn’t know if you even knew that was a possibility based on your previous statements. I was only trying to help.
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Thanks.
Just sometimes there seems to be an attitude of ‘MB is always right’ and Apple is evil on here…
Oh, I know about the anti-Apple attitude. Trust me :-). I’ve ignored it for years.
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Not with MediaMonkey which can be considered to be a “variation” of iTunes (due to it supporting most iPod’s natively), but thats because MM doesn’t even have a tick-box choice.
The only other player I use is Plex, sometimes, but that’s just a big ol mess about how that figures out compilations and VA’s, which isn’t in scope here or even for this board in general.
The picard user guide Appendix B: Tag Mapping — MusicBrainz Picard v2.9alpha1 documentation
has the entry for Compilation
and the footnote:
5. For Picard>=1.3 this indicates a Various Artists album; for Picard<=1.2 this indicates albums with tracks by different artists which is incorrect (e.g.: an original album with a duet with a feat. artist would show as a Compilation). In neither case does this indicate a MusicBrainz Release Group subtype of compilation.
If MB just had a ‘Various Artists’ flag then it would be solved.
Just to let you know the ipod and iphone behave differently even when fed from the same itunes…
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Yeah doesn’t surprise me. My Sony Walkman digital music player doesn’t really understand compilations properly either 
The ipod works properly …
I think you are mixing up too many things here, MusicBrainz Picard isn’t MusicBrainz database, compilation attribute on MB isn’t compilation tag in Picard.
You ask about MusicBrainz definition of a compilation and ends with iTunes definition of a compilation.
If what you are trying to solve is a Picard issue related to compilation tag & iTunes compatibility have a look at Picard 1.3 changelog:
- Compilation tag/variable functionality (for tagging & file naming) has been split into two:
- %compilation% is now aligned with iTunes, and set only for Various Artists type compilations
- %_multiartist% variable now indicates whether this release has tracks by multiple artists
(in order to prepend the artist name to the filename as shown in the default file naming script)
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Since you asked, here’s another example.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B07THTJXKM is a best hits album by a single artist. The record company, Universal Music Japan, says in the copyright statement,
So at the very least, the MusicBrainz definition overlaps with Universal Music’s definition. (Universal Music is the biggest record company in the world.)
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Correct me if I’m wrong (it has happened before!!), but if someone can give or help @dpr with the Picard code to only set compilation = 1 when the album artist is ‘various artists’, doesn’t that solve the issue? Why is another flag needed?
There might be more nuance to the issue than I’m understanding because usually by now in a thread someone has pointed to the code that will make Picard work for what’s needed (even if a DB issue/concern hasn’t been solved yet).
Actually this is default behavior, Picard sets the iTunes compilation flag exactly when the album artist is the “Various Artists” artist. That also means that Picard does not set it for the Bob Seger Greatest Hits release which started this discussion.
A script that explicitly does this and which could also be manually used on a selection of files (via context menu “Run script”) would be:
$set(compilation,$eq(%albumartist%,Various Artists))
@dpr If the issue was indeed about tagging your files with the compilation flag for iTunes this might help. But as I wrote above it would be default behavior to set compilation only for VA releases, so if Picard does something else maybe you have a script that explicitly sets the compilation tag.
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Yes, you are correct. I consider Picard and MB to be one and the same. I know they are not, but I think and wish they were the same or even closer. I think of the MB database being definitive and representing the ‘truth’ as best we can accurately determine it. I can understand the role of Picard reading and writing various formats such as mp3 and flac etc with information to/from the MB database. The question is the balance between storing more detailed information in the database and using rules to interpret the data.
Thanks to you and others I now understand why albums by a single artist are called compilations - thats what they are called by record labels. I still want to distinguish those from ‘various artists’ releases. I understand we can script this in Picard, and will try it out but I believe it is the wrong place to implement this information.
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To get specific, what do you propose is changed on the MB database end?
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It’s more of a philosophy that I think applies in general. In this specific case, my opinion is that I’d like the database hold the distinction between the two cases under the current definition of compilation. Of course its an opinion.
Hmm, I guess for me it does hold the distinction - one is stored under ‘Various Artist’. We even display those in a separate tab on the artist page.
But anyway, that’s just my thinking, so fair enough 
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