MusicIP import may mess up tract artsts in database

[krisvanneste]

Initially, I had artists tagged as "Lastname, Firstname".

When I read in some posts about the ARTISTSORT tag, I retagged my files in mp3tag as "FirstName LastName", and added "LastName, FirstName" as ARTISTSORT tag (in mp3tag v 2.46a, it's actually called ARTISTSORTORDER).

After a full rescan, I found that most (but not all) albums now had 2 track artists: "FirstName LastName" and "LastName, FirstName". I did not understand why it was different for different albums, as I had followed the same procedure, and the tags looked the same. I had the impression it was related to the filenames or directory names (some of which followed the earlier convention), but I didn't see why Squeezebox Server would be using this information.

I discovered the setting Advanced | Formatting | Guess Tags Formats, and removed all entries. This did not make any difference (not surprisingly, as this setting only applies to files without reasonable tags). But looking around a little further, I found another setting: Advanced | MusicIP | Use MusicIP, which was set to "Import all song data from MusicIP (slower)". When I changed it into "Only read mixable status from MusicIP (faster)", and rescanned, all duplicate track artists were gone.

I don't know whether that MusicIP setting is the default. It's possible I played with it at some point, and forgot about it. But maybe it's also the cause of some scanning problems reported by other users.

[Philip Meyer]

>But looking around a little further, I found another setting:
>Advanced | MusicIP | Use MusicIP, which was set to "Import all song
>data from MusicIP (slower)". When I changed it into "Only read mixable
>status from MusicIP (faster)", and rescanned, all duplicate track
>artists were gone.
>
>I don't know whether that MusicIP setting is the default.
>
I recommend either:
1. Set a music library path in SBS and scan with SBS, only reading mixable status from MusicIP.
2. Do a full MusicIP import, without setting a music path in SBS (so MusicIP is used to do scanning, and this is imported into SBS rather than merged into SBS library).

Having files scanned in SBS and also imported from MusicIP is not a good idea.

The default is to do a full import of tag data from MusicIP.

I added support to only read mixable status for several reasons. Effectively, for each track in your SBS library, it looks in MusicIP to see if the track is mixable. This has a performance benefit for new/changed file scans, as it only needs to do the lookup for tracks that do not have a mixable status.

But it also means that it doesn't import music from the MusicIP library, only the SBS scanner. Not only is this a performance benefit, but it means tag support is much better:

1. SBS scanner understands more file types and tag formats than MusicIP. So you can have more files in the library (some may not be mixable using MusicIP).
2. SBS scanner interprets tags better than MusicIP, and the scanner is being developed/supported (MusicIP is not being developed/supported).
3. MusicIP does some weird things when tags aren't present, which don't work too well when imported into SBS (eg. "Miscellaneous" albums, instead of "No Album").

Phil

[krisvanneste]

Thank you for this very clear explanation!
Kris