Single Artist Album sorted as Various Artists in Album Cover view panel

[FizzyTea]

Issue discovered as follows:
Browsing through album cover view.
Get to Jeff Buckley section. Notice album Grace is missing.
Switch to library view panel.
Select Jeff Buckley in Artist pane. Grace is listed among albums.
Switch to Album cover panel. Only Jeff Buckley albums showing as Jeff Buckley is selected in library panel (cool). Grace is present but listed as Various Artists.

Investigation:
Look at tags for Grace.
Every track has Jeff Buckley set as Artist.
No Album Artist tag on any track.
Some tracks have composer tag, others don't. In fact three tracks only have composer tag. All three have different composer.

Possibly this can be recreated.

[kit1cat]

I had a similar problem, 3 albums all called "The Singles" by 3 different artists all showing as various artists, changing the album name tag to include artist name solved my problem Clearing the compose and album artist tags cleaned up a copy of more albums for me.

[Tim Curtis]

Since there is no standard tag or method for designating a compilation album the Library loader performs whats called "compilation album rollup" when an Album is associated with multiple Artists. This prevents the album from appearing multiple times in the Library albums list (once for each different artist).

The rollup generates a virtual compilation album i.e, a single occurrence of the Album in the Library albums list. It also assigns the name "Various Artists" to the Album which appears in the Album cover panel.

What I do for compilation album tagging is set the AlbumArtist tag to "Various Artists" and then in Customize I set the Artist list ordering to "AlbumArtist". Then the Library Artist list will contain an entry named "Various Artists" which when clicked will display all the compilation albums. The name "Various Artists" will also be consistently displayed under the cover art and thumbnail. You could also use something like "Compilation" instead of "Various Artists" for setting the AlbumArtist tag.

For the case where there are multiple different albums with the same name for example "Christmas Songs", "Greatest Hits" etc., there is a SQL setting that can be updated which contains a comma separated list of album names to exclude from the compilation rollup. Its default value is "greatest hits" See below.

Display the list of excluded album names

Code:

sqlite3 /var/local/www/db/moode-sqlite3.db "select * from cfg_system where param='compilation_excludes'"

Update the list of excluded album names

Code:

sqlite3 /var/local/www/db/moode-sqlite3.db "update cfg_system set value='greatest hits,christmas songs,the singles' where param='compilation_excludes'"

Reboot after making changes to the sql table.

-Tim

[FizzyTea]

Since there is no standard tag or method for designating a compilation album the Library loader performs whats called "compilation album rollup" when an Album is associated with multiple Artists. This prevents the album from appearing multiple times in the Library albums list (once for each different artist).

The rollup generates a virtual compilation album i.e, a single occurrence of the Album in the Library albums list. It also assigns the name "Various Artists" to the Album which appears in the Album cover panel.

What I do for compilation album tagging is set the AlbumArtist tag to "Various Artists" and then in Customize I set the Artist list ordering to "AlbumArtist". Then the Library Artist list will contain an entry named "Various Artists" which when clicked will display all the compilation albums. The name "Various Artists" will also be consistently displayed under the cover art and thumbnail. You could also use something like "Compilation" instead of "Various Artists" for setting the AlbumArtist tag.

For the case where there are multiple different albums with the same name for example "Christmas Songs", "Greatest Hits" etc., there is a SQL setting that can be updated which contains a comma separated list of album names to exclude from the compilation rollup. Its default value is "greatest hits" See below.

Display the list of excluded album names

Code:

sqlite3 /var/local/www/db/moode-sqlite3.db "select * from cfg_system where param='compilation_excludes'"

Update the list of excluded album names

Code:

sqlite3 /var/local/www/db/moode-sqlite3.db "update cfg_system set value='greatest hits,christmas songs,the singles' where param='compilation_excludes'"

Reboot after making changes to the sql table.

-Tim

But the issue here is an album with a single artist being displayed as Various Artists due to various Composer Tag values. I do not think it is the same as what you are describing above.

This is a problem if you have a single artist releasing an album of cover versions or indeed an artist who includes a single (as in my case) cover version on an album. Moreover a pop or soul album from the 50s or 60s is likely to contain many different composers but should be grouped under the recording artist not various artists.

This is not an issue with the library as such as the album I described is properly listed in the library but is grouped differently for Album Cover View.

The workaround is clearly to delete the composer tags but these seems very unsatisfactory.

[Tim Curtis]

Only Genre, Artist (or AlbumArtist) and Album are used to sort/group in the Library. The composer tag, if its present, is only used for displaying the composer under the track.

The Album Cover panel is presented in Album by Artist tag order. Composer is not used at all.

[FizzyTea]

Only Genre, Artist (or AlbumArtist) and Album are used to sort/group in the Library. The composer tag, if its present, is only used for displaying the composer under the track.

The Album Cover panel is presented in Album by Artist tag order. Composer is not used at all.

Ok.

Can you (or anybody) suggest why an album where all tracks are tagged with the same Artist and same Album Title, with no Album Artist tag would be listed (correctly) under the artist in Library View but grouped as Various Artists in the Album Cover Panel?

Track by track there are differences in genre, and composer. Some tracks had a date tag others didn't.
I don't think any of these differences should cause this behaviour.

The particular album is not an issue (I am actually going to rerip this album as it is an itunes rip and I would prefer FLAC nowadays) but I am seeing this as an unusual behaviour/potential bug.

[Tim Curtis]

Thats due to the album having tracks with different Genre tags. This causes the album to appear multiple times in the data structure thats generated on the server by the Library Loader. This in turn is going to fool the routines that populate the Library into thinking its some sort of compilation album.

The data structure that the Library requires is described below and is typical of most Music collections. 

{Genre1: {Artist1: {Album1: [{song1}, {song2}], Album2:...}, Artist2:...}, Genre2:...}

Its not going to correctly reflect the case where an album contains tracks by same artist but tagged with multiple genres.

-Tim

[FizzyTea]

Thats due to the album having tracks with different Genre tags. This causes the album to appear multiple times in the data structure thats generated on the server by the Library Loader. This in turn is going to fool the routines that populate the Library into thinking its some sort of compilation album.

The data structure that the Library requires is described below and is typical of most Music collections. 

{Genre1: {Artist1: {Album1: [{song1}, {song2}], Album2:...}, Artist2:...}, Genre2:...}

Its not going to correctly reflect the case where an album contains tracks by same artist but tagged with multiple genres.

-Tim

Ah genre the most troublesome of tags. Thanks.

[Lttlwing16]

In album view, I would like to combine all albums by album title, regardless of artist title.

Currently I have multiple albums that are split by the featuring artist, or artist name. For instance the album Get Lifted by John Legend appears 5 times in album view due to artist "John Legend featuring Snoop Dogg" etc. etc.

Anyway to remedy this in Moode or do I need to manually edit out the artist tags?

Thanks in advance!

[Tim Curtis]

I don't have a r642 build running but ism't there a sort by Albums option in Library Config, EDIT library options?