How to add Various Artists media to Amarok music collection?

Question

I've recently started to use Amarok, it went smoothly for a while but now for some reason the collection's completely messed up. It seems that Various Artists albums are ignored or partly shown. Tags are OK and consistent as far as i can tell. I tried to import from file and move to collection but Amarok split my albums in many folders, sorted per artists (the nightmare!!!)

So how can i get Amarok to simply read what's in my Music folder and how can I prevent it from changing my files? As I see it the program should adapt to my music, not the other way around.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Caution: you should back-up your files before trying this, since the behaviour of Amarok appears to be inconsistent and could lead to loss of data.

1. Browse hard-drive for files in Amarok Select the files of the various artists album you wish to add to the collection

2. Right-click and select "edit track details" Toggle on the "per track" check box and add enter "Various Artists" in the "Album Artist" category. (This may be useless, since Amarok doesn't seem to always save this tag, but it may not necessarily be a problem, see 5.)

3. Save & Close Select all the tracks you want to add to your collection again if necessary.
4. Right-click and select "Move to collection" or "copy to collection".
5. 1. Edit how the file will be written to path by dragging and dropping various elements to the path. Ideally, you should be able to use the Album Artist in the path, which should show "Various Artists" as edited in line 2. But that didn't work for me. If that's also the case then go to 5.2, else go to 6
   2. Click on advanced and edit the path manually, for instance to Various Artists/%album/%track %artist - %title. This should save the album under the ~/Music/Various Artists/ rather than splitting the album into several folders.

6. Click OK and it should go smoothly.

PS: some bug occurred with one of my albums the tracks of which were duplicated in the collection (although they exist only once on the hard-drive).