Music Artists case sensitive?

[tmiranda]

I've been adding music to Sage and I noticed that the "artist" tag seem to be case sensitive. What I mean is that if I browse by artist "Better Than Ezra" and "better than ezra" appear as two different artists. Is this normal or should I file a bug report?

[ke6guj]

I don;t know if it is a bug or normal, but Sage is very strict on tagging. If there are Any differences in tag names, then it is considered a different artist.

Winamp, for example, will ignore capitalization, and will consolidate THE ARTIST with ARTIST. It may even overlook some dashes, IIRC.

[tmiranda]

The music tagging is driving me absolutely nuts. Sage is very inconsistent especially when changing tags.

Now I am having an issue getting Sage to understand that a group of 12 songs, all by a different artist but with the exact same album name are one album and not 12 different albums. I've tried setting "part of a compilation", I've tried clearing it, I've tried removing the album from the import directory (re-scan) then adding it back (re-scan) and nothing works.

Every once in a while I see a song or two with the artist listed as "4opt_priority arg=idle". When I looked at the logfile (error logging is on) I see:

Thu 5/3 19:24:17.917 ERROR parsing thumbnail info of:java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "4opt_priority arg=idle"

This seems to have to do with thumbnails and not music...

I also see a bunch of errors like this:

Thu 5/3 19:18:55.018 Error in MediaServerConnection of :java.io.EOFException

and a few errors like this:

Thu 5/3 4:01:18.949 ERROR: Couldn't detect duration for file:\\NASLite\Disk-1\MotorcycleRacing-FIMWorldSupersportNetherlands-1870763-0.mpg guessing it

This does not seem to have anything to do with music either (but it is a bit worrying.)

I'd like to file a bug report but I just can't reproduce the errors consistently.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Now I am having an issue getting Sage to understand that a group of 12 songs, all by a different artist but with the exact same album name are one album and not 12 different albums. I've tried setting "part of a compilation", I've tried clearing it, I've tried removing the album from the import directory (re-scan) then adding it back (re-scan) and nothing works.

Try setting the Album Artist tag for the songs to something like "Various Artists". If there is no Album Artist tag, I think the Artist tag is used for each song. Unfortunately, it turns out that a lot of tag apps either don't use that tag or call it something else.

And, that tag is used by SageTV v6, but not v5 or earlier.

- Andy

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

The music tagging is driving me absolutely nuts. Sage is very inconsistent especially when changing tags.

Now I am having an issue getting Sage to understand that a group of 12 songs, all by a different artist but with the exact same album name are one album and not 12 different albums. I've tried setting "part of a compilation", I've tried clearing it, I've tried removing the album from the import directory (re-scan) then adding it back (re-scan) and nothing works.

I have spend days retagging my files so that they are all perfectly tagged. For compilations, you do need to use the "Album Artist" tag as Andy mentioned. Pick one name, such as "Various Artists", for all compilations and it'll display better. YOu'll still get all 12 artists listed separately as "one song albums" due to the 12 different "Artist" tags, but you'll also get a single album listed under "Various Artists" that is the complete album.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by ke6guj

I have spend days retagging my files so that they are all perfectly tagged. For compilations, you do need to use the "Album Artist" tag as Andy mentioned. Pick one name, such as "Various Artists", for all compilations and it'll display better. YOu'll still get all 12 artists listed separately as "one song albums" due to the 12 different "Artist" tags, but you'll also get a single album listed under "Various Artists" that is the complete album.

I'm not sure I understand... are you referring to the Artists view in the music browser? There should only be a single album containing those songs on the Albums view.

For the Artists view, it all depends on how you have it configured... use Options, then "Choose people to include as Artists". If you include Artist in addition to Album Artist, then yes, you will see each of those artists in the list. BTW: If you really want to increase the artist count, include the Composer too.

- Andy

[tmiranda]

Jack, Andy,

THanks for the pointers. I'll try these things out over the weekend.

BTW - I've been using "Tag&Rename" to change tags. I tried several others but this one seems to give the most "bang for the buck". What do you use?

[BBCritical]

Best one I have come across just recently is Helium 2. I was using 3 others at the same time before this one... mainly because it supports multiple artists

[Opus4]

There's a somewhat recent discussion of taggers & rippers here. I just use WMP to rip/tag & there is also a link in that thread to a utility that can check the tags.

- Andy

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I'm not sure I understand... are you referring to the Artists view in the music browser? There should only be a single album containing those songs on the Albums view.

Yah, I meant in the Artists view.

For the Artists view, it all depends on how you have it configured... use Options, then "Choose people to include as Artists". If you include Artist in addition to Album Artist, then yes, you will see each of those artists in the list. BTW: If you really want to increase the artist count, include the Composer too.

Ah, new feature I seemed to have missed in the Stock UI. Nice feature. Not available in SageMC

Originally Posted by tmiranda

BTW - I've been using "Tag&Rename" to change tags. I tried several others but this one seems to give the most "bang for the buck". What do you use?

Tag&Rename for me as well. I love the integration with CDDB and amazon.com for DL'ing tags and album art.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by ke6guj

Ah, new feature I seemed to have missed in the Stock UI. Nice feature. Not available in SageMC

Who says ?

Focus the "View By Artist" button and bring up the options dialog


Dirk

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by flachbar

Who says ?

Focus the "View By Artist" button and bring up the options dialog


Dirk

Doh!!

I even checked to see if the options dialog had any filters, but I wasn't highlighting the "View By Artist" button at the time.

[tmiranda]

I still can't get it to work right and am still baffled. I have several albums made up of songs by different artists. All of them were tagged in the same way using the same tagging program. Some of them show up as "single artist albums" and some show up as a single album under the "album" view" (which is what I want).

I have only selected "Artist" in the "Include as Artist" dialog. I checked the "Album Artist" tag anyway and that seems to have no effect on what I am seeing.

The only difference I can think of is that the albums that appear correctly were ripped from CD into FLAC format ans the albums that do not appear corectly are MP3s I downloaded. I think MP3 and FLAC use different tags so maybe that is the issue.

[PhillJones]

seeing as this issue cropped up, I tried to fix the music problem I have. A couple of albums that I have, which are single artist with exactly the same artiist tag (created by mp3tag which allows you to synchronize artist tags).

I think sage won't recheck tags unless you remove the import directory and re-import it so I removed the import directory and rescanned the media library with no music import folder. So the music library should be empty and yet, sage reports that there are 19 albums, although none of them have any songs in them.

I think these problems are related, there's a problem with the way that sage handles the media import library, perhaps something subtle in the files does this but I can't seem to find anything wrong with my tags or files.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

I think sage won't recheck tags unless you remove the import directory and re-import it so I removed the import directory and rescanned the media library with no music import folder. So the music library should be empty and yet, sage reports that there are 19 albums, although none of them have any songs in them.

Did you also delete any existing playlists before the rescan ?


Dirk

[tmiranda]

I am now sure my problem is caused by Sage handling FLAC tags differently from MP3 tags. I used dbPoweramp to convert one of my MP3 albums to FLAC and then used Tag&Rename to make all of the tags exactly the same. I named one album "Album-MP3" and the other "Album-FLAC". Album-MP3 shows up as multiple "single artist" albums. Album-FLAC shows up as one album by "Various" (which is what I want.)

Unless somebody tells me this is working as expected I am going to report it as a bug.

Tom

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by flachbar

Did you also delete any existing playlists before the rescan ?


Dirk

I hadn't before. Now I have and it didn't solve the problem.

I tried turnig on bebugging but the file it makes is so big and dense I'm not sure I can find any useful information in it. If only there was an event log or something. At the minute, I ask it to refresh the import media and I'm not even sure it's doing anything.

[PhillJones]

I re-imported the music directory and all my albums came back but those two miss-filed albums are still miss-filled.

Is there any way to get any information out of sage about why it files what where. I feel like I'm working in the dark.

[sleonard]

Our only options are to submit bug reports. Sage has greatly improved the music library over the last several versions. I sure they will continue working on it and bug reports will help.

Scott

[tmiranda]

I reported my issue as a bug. We will see what happens but generally speaking Sage has been very good about fixing bugs that are properly reported. I had a bug a while back having to do with the MVP not playing back files recorded with the DualTV and Sage support was real good about getting that fixed.