Does anyone use the Compilation Rollup option?

[Miss Sissy Princess]

I guess compilations are intended to work like this, but when I am in the views shown below, with no artist selected, I see multiple copies of each compilation album -- one copy per track.  So I see my fifty-some compilation albums more than a thousand times in total (one copy of each album per track on the album).  

       

In that first view, they are at least all grouped together when scrolling.  In the second view, they are all over the place (based on artist names).

I'd sure prefer to have just one copy of a compilation album shown in that case with "Various Artists" underneath.  

I don't suppose there's some hidden (or not hidden) setting to accomplish that, right?

-- Fred

[Tim Curtis]

Hi Fred,

There is no setting or hack with the new library loader. It's built around the common convention of using the Album Artist tag for indicating compilations. The benefit is that it has better performance and allows for new features in the future. It also automatically handles the case where tracks belonging to the same album have different Genres.

As I stated before though if a dev writes the code for parsing out the iTunes TCMP frame then I'll see if it's possible to integrate it as an option but there is no guarantee.

-Tim

[Miss Sissy Princess]

Hi Tim,

I made a mistake.  I set each track on those compilation albums to an album artist of "Various Artists" under Apple Music (replaces iTunes in Catalina).  I used my script to rsync them to the NAS (where moOde gets its library).  For reasons I'm still researching, the MP3 tags did not match the Apple Music tags.  I'm going to experiment with the Music apps tag format converter and see if I can force it to write the updated tags (although I thought I did that).

-- Fred

[Miss Sissy Princess]

Tim,

Update:  moOde is working properly, as I expected and wanted it to work, and as you designed.

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What happened, short version:  
The MacOS Catalina public beta has a bug in the Music app (iTunes replacement) that bit me; it wasn't writing the tags back to disk even when explicitly told to.

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What happened, in more detail:

1. I used Music to set the album artist to "Various Artists" for all tracks on all compilations.
   
2. I used the Music app's "Convert ID3 Tags" feature to force a write of the tags.
   
3. I looked at the tag on the first highlighted track (using a tag editor) and saw that it now showed "Various Artists."  (That turned out to be a very unfortunate choice of track.)
   
4. I deleted the "compilations" subdirectory in the moOde music library on my NAS and used my MacOS Automator app/script to rsync the files to the NAS.
   
5. I had moOde regen its MPD database, but compilation albums kept appearing multiple times.
   
6. I incorrectly surmised that it must have been a conscious decision on your part to display those albums that way when no artist was highlighted, and posted a reply here based on that.
   
7. It seems that the current Catalina public beta (at least on my iMac Pro) has a bug where Music is only processing the first track in a highlighted list of tracks when a "Convert ID3 Tags" is done.  
   
8. I gave up on Music and used (tag editor) Kid3, updating the tags on all of the compilation album track files.  After rsyncing that to the NAS, and regenerating the MPD database, everything worked properly.
   

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There were other issues, such as the Music app deciding it wasn't going to respect the setting for the location of the iTunes media files, instead choosing to use a default directory on my primary volume, but I won't bore you further with that kind of thing.

Sorry for wasting your time and adding confusion to the discussion.  I got complacent because the Catalina beta has been pretty solid and reliable.

Regards,
 Fred

[Tim Curtis]

Hi Fred,

No prob. I haven't tried Catalina beta yet but that bug is a really nasty one :-0 so I think I'll wait for GA.

Actually the discussion was really good and some dev might pick up the TCMP project :-)

[moodenigo]

Well, this is persuading me to do something I *should* have done time ago: to go through my albums and if there are different track artists, I will set the Album Artist tag to either the main artist or "Various Artists".

I think I will write a little python/atomicparsley program to partly automatise this.

I am also discovering some files which are defective, as a positive side effect. Time to regrab them then ;-)

 Roberto

[moodenigo]

I gave up on Music and used (tag editor) Kid3, updating the tags on all of the compilation album track files.  After rsyncing that to the NAS, and regenerating the MPD database, everything worked properly.

Under macOS, Metadatics works quite the treat. I also use mp3tag, and occasionally some shell scripts

 Roberto

[Miss Sissy Princess]

Actually the discussion was really good and some dev might pick up the TCMP project :-)

Thanks, Tim.  

Maybe a smarter, more standards-compliant tool would be one which would crawl a directory tree and enter a 'Various Artists' album artist tag on each file that had Apple's TCMP entry present and set to 1.  I may look into that if I find myself with spare time (and a lot more motivation than I usually possess).

-- Fred

[WolfgangZenner]

Hi,

The crew is trying to determine whether the Compilation Rollup option, which was added to Library options in the early days of moOde, is being used anymore.

The alternative is to simply set the AlbumArtist tag to "Various Artists" for any compilation albums in the collection.

-Tim

I' ve gone back to version 4, because I really need the compilation rollup option. I have very much Compilations and don't like to override the Album Artist.