Enhancement requests: album art and compilations

[MrRalph]

My music library consists of 1901 albums with 29725 songs by 4771 artists. All FLAC and meticulous tagged. Tagging with Foobar and played through a Logitech Media Server eco-system. I also need to support ITunes for wife and kids; this is where mp3fs comes in.

There are two areas where I need to decide how to proceed: album art and compilations. If there are no plans to incorporate these features in mp3fs, that's fine and good to know, and do I need to do some retagging instead. So this item is more to understand the roadmap than anything else.

1. Album art. I keep my album art on purpose disconnected from the music files tags and store them instead per album folder as folder.jpg. Works great on most programs but not in ITunes. Addressed in Embed album art in tags #18. This would be a very useful enhancement. Is there an update on whether this is somewhere on the roadmap?
2. Compilations. I tag them with COMPILATION = 1 and leave Album Artist empty. Most programs (especially the Squeezebox environment) treat this correctly as compilation. Not ITunes. ITunes needs to have an Album Artist tag with for example "Various Artists". From a design perspective I'm against this but I acknowledge it's open to much debate. My question is, will there be any tag mapping capabilities implemented like requested on Include option to filter/replace multiple Vorbis Comment fields #16 so I can use this for this purpose. Or have an option added -cXXX that means: treat tracks with an empty "album artist" tag as compilation and render the album artist tag as XXX.

Thanks, Ralph

[bluemoehre]

I got your point... Checking my collection I noticed the same: Compilations/sampler have different setup. Some with ALBUM ARTIST=Various, some without this field.

In my opinion ALBUM ARTIST=Various is the best solution to mark something as sampler, due a missing/empty field implies "unknown".
This is realated to my ticket with modifying fields on the fly: #16

[khenriks]

I meant to reply to this sooner; sorry.

1. This could happen, but not really super soon. As in, maybe before the end of 2014. I've actually had a lot going on, new job, moving, finishing old projects, etc, so I've had to push mp3fs down in priority a bit. I like the idea though, because it is wasteful to store the album art multiple times identically.
2. This one would be lower priority than 1. COMPILATION isn't something I see really documented, and actually there's not really a specification for what Vorbis (FLAC) tags are valid. I personally use
   ALBUMARTIST=Various Artists for all compilations. This is the standard followed by MusicBrainz, and works well for my usage with iTunes. This seems more likely to be something that would become possible with a general tag mapping facility that may or may not appear in the future. I would personally recommend modifying the tags in your FLAC files.