FLAC: Album Artist not working correctly - or at all really

[spedinfargo]

We use our squeeze ecosystem for all things except local music (I use Jriver to listen to my collection at work, Pandora and Spotify at home almost exclusively). I recently got a Touch and set up a listening station so I'm getting around to setting up my music library in LMS finally.

I can't get Album Artist to work at all with my FLAC files. See attached for an example file as it shows in MP3Tag - as you can see I have ALBUMARTIST, ALBUM ARTIST, and ALBUMARTISTSORT all filled out with "The Beatles" for this particular song. But when I go to browse I don't see "The Beatles" in my list!




Interestingly, I have some FLAC files that have NO AlbumArtist tag at all and those actually DO show up when I browse by Album Artist on LMS. See screenshot of where I'm getting Frank Sinatra and my Elton John songs, even though those FLAC files only have ARTIST tag filled in.

I have "Treat TPE2 MP3 Tag as Album Artist" marked (but that only matters for MP3, right?) and I have Browse Artists set to as "Use two separate lists for Album Artists and All Artists" in the drop down.

Any ideas what I'm missing here? I would expect it to work the opposite of this!

[Paul Webster]

Do you have any "Beatles, The"?

[slartibartfast]

Are you looking under "T" or "B"? LMS ignores "the" by default.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[spedinfargo]

Are you looking under "T" or "B"? LMS ignores "the" by default.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Thanks for the quick responses.

Nope - I literally only have four albums in my entire library when I noticed this: Frank Sinatra - The Best of the Columbia Years 1943-1952, Elton John - Greatest Hits 1970-2002, and Beatles Blue and Red albums.

Under Album Artists I have only Frank Sinatra and Elton John. No sign whatsoever of Beatles; The Beatles; or Beatles, The.

Under All Artists, I do have some stuff:



You can see how it's pulling things out of my Red and Blue albums: some extra Artist tags on a few (Billy Preston, John Lennon, Paul McCartney) but no sign of any of those under Album Artists.

I'll keep playing around with it. This is 7.9, by the way, pretty recently nightly.

[DJanGo]

See attached for an example file as it shows in MP3Tag - as you can see I have ALBUMARTIST, ALBUM ARTIST, and ALBUMARTISTSORT all filled out with "The Beatles" for this particular song.

No its not!
The Beatles <> Beatles, The

You should tag your stuff I cant remember that The Blue Album 1967-1970 is a complilation.

[spedinfargo]

No its not!
The Beatles <> Beatles, The

You should tag your stuff I cant remember that The Blue Album 1967-1970 is a complilation.

I'll have to keep playing around with it. There's definitely something going on with this particular group of files. I went into the other two albums and added the Album Artist tag of "AA Test" and "CC Test" and those show up fine (those were blank before). However, when I changed all of the Beatles ones to "BB Test" it still aren't getting picked up when browsing by Album Artist.

I'll go through and wipe out the tags on these and start over - if I remember correctly I may have actually made "virtual" Red and Blue complication albums by copying from the actual albums themselves. I very well could have some crap hanging around that shouldn't be in the tags. It's good to know that IN GENERAL the album artist stuff is working correctly though - seems to be just something wrong with this particular set of files...

[reinholdk]

As DJanGo mentioned, remove the COMPILATION tag from the files.
And of course, if you have different ARTIST tags in an album, make sure that all files have identical ALBUMARTIST tags. And I'd remove ALBUM ARTIST and ARTISTS tags but use only one spelling. ARTISTSORT and ALBUMARTISTSORT is ok if you want a different sorting, but for "The Beatles" it's not needed with LMS, because "The" is ignored by default. But keep in mind, if you use a *SORT tag for an artist on any single track, all tracks for this artist will be sorted accordingly.

[JJZolx]

Doesn't hurt to have ALBUMARTISTSORT and ARTISTSORT that are redundant. When I tag, I automatically add them to everything. I've removed 'Articles to Ignore When Sorting' from LMS in the settings.

ALBUM: The Game
ALBUMSORT: Game, The
ALBUMARTIST: Queen
ALBUMARTISTSORT: Queen
ARTIST: Queen
ARTISTSORT: Queen

But the problem you're having is almost certainly due to the COMPILATION tag. LMS uses it as an indicator of an album with different artists for the different tracks. Not a single artist's compilation album. Using it for the latter will cause LMS to do some odd things.

I agree with the above, and would also remove 'ALBUM ARTIST' and 'ARTISTS', unless you have some particular program that needs them. They'll likely just cause confusion at some point in the future and may make your library a little harder to maintain.

[spedinfargo]

But the problem you're having is almost certainly due to the COMPILATION tag. LMS uses it as an indicator of an album with different artists for the different tracks. Not a single artist's compilation album. Using it for the latter will cause LMS to do some odd things.

I agree with the above, and would also remove 'ALBUM ARTIST' and 'ARTISTS', unless you have some particular program that needs them. They'll likely just cause confusion at some point in the future and may make your library a little harder to maintain.

This was definitely the case! Kicking the COMPILATION tag to the curb took care of it. Mystery solved. I'll have to do some thinking on whether to update all of my tags and get rid of that for single-artist complications or do something else to work around it. Almost all of my tagging was done using MusicBrainz/Jaikoz so all of the tags are automatic. But I can fine-tune them with MP3Tag as well...

[BJW]

another long standing issue...

Comp tags should be ignored for making lists / browsing, except for a few niche cases: when specifically browsing comps, or when ALBUM ARTIST tags don't exist. in the case of the latter, a comp tag should just mean Alabum Artist = Various Artists or whatever string the user sets in the options for that setting (which itself is buggy in the default)