Comment 55 for bug 319494

does it make sense to change "First Level --> Album Artist" to be the default? i can think of several reasons for it, and none against it. most importantly:

  * with "First Level --> Artist", it's painstaking to put an album under "Various Artists" (for reference, or for playing the whole album in order) unless the track artist is the same throughout the album. with some genres and release types, seeing different track artists within an album is the most common case.

  * users are typically more likely to know the album artist than the particular combination of collaborating artists on each track.

  * having tens or hundreds of albums under "Various Artists" makes it impractical to browse them without filtering. sorting the first level by album artist reduces the count, especially with well tagged tracks.

perhaps the level selection can be made clearer, or perhaps the sorting can be improved by some redesign. i think those improvements should be the topics of separate bug reports. until then, changing the default dimension for first level sorting would provide a major improvement for most users.

i also suggest renaming "First Level --> Artist" to "First Level --> Track Artist" to avoid ambiguity and confusion. after all, album artists are also artists.