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

Answer 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.

Answer 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?

Answer 3

It's 2024 and there's still no option to browse by "Album Artist" in Rhythmbox.

Here's an example of why we would love this feature. Many artists create albums with other featured artists on specific songs. Browsing by Artists puts these into separate list items. Browsing by "Album Artists" keeps them together.

Take Polyphia for example. When I browse them in my music library under the "Artist" category, I see a slew of entries. But I may just want to listen to all songs by Polyphia. Yes, I could highlight all of the "Artists" that start with Polyphia and then see all the songs, but what if this doesn't contain all of the songs I want to see because the "Artist" that worked with Polyphia on a specific song showed up as "XXX with Polyphia", and isn't alphabetically beside the main Artist name? Then I have to go looking in more manual ways.

A proposed solution would be to add the "Album Artist" meta tag as a new category search option. This meta tag, if set correctly, would simply be "Polyphia" in all albums published by Polyphia.