Music Artists case sensitive?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

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.

Originally Posted by 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.)

Are you using the Album Artist tag in your mp3 files? Since changing it to view Artists by Album Artist didn't change anything in the list, that seems to indicate that you aren't using the Album Artist tag.

You can check the tags in WMP too -- highlight a song, right click, choose Advanced Tag Editor, choose the Artist Info tab, check the Album Artist setting.

Originally Posted by 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).

Your sig line and screen shot indicates you are using v5. Album Artist was added for v6, along with many other music library improvements in the core and in the UI.

- Andy

[tmiranda]

Andy,

My choice of words was poor regarding "checking album artist tag". What I meant to say was I looked at the album artist tag in a number of songs and they are all set correctly. I do not have "album artist" selected in the "what ito use as an artist" option box for Sage.

I tried changing some of the album artists tags to see if Sage was somehow looking at them even though I had not selected that option in the dialog.

I hope that is clearer.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

My choice of words was poor regarding "checking album artist tag". What I meant to say was I looked at the album artist tag in a number of songs and they are all set correctly. I do not have "album artist" selected in the "what ito use as an artist" option box for Sage.

I hope that is clearer.

No, I guess I still am not catching onto what is happening. Since I am not sure what is happening, maybe the bug report with sample files will get an answer for you.

All I can say is that if the Artists view does not have "Album Artist" selected as the artist to be shown, each individually artist on a various-artist album should be listed separately; there will be no Various Artist item in the list, unless that is actually stored as the "Artist" tag. And, the MP3 files for that album all need "Various Artists" as the Album Artist tag in order to have that listed as a single multi-song album in the Album view.

I tried changing some of the album artists tags to see if Sage was somehow looking at them even though I had not selected that option in the dialog.

I'm probably still misunderstanding things, but just in case... selecting that option in the dialog of which types of artists to list only affects what is listed in the Artists view; it has nothing to do with how the data about those songs is stored in the database or how the songs are listed in any other view.

- Andy

[tmiranda]

I finally got things working like I want, although I do think we are misunderstanding each other. Here is what I did:

- In the Artist view make sure ONLY "Artist" is selected in the "what to consider as an artist" dialog.
- When tagging multi-artist albums make sure the "Album Artist" tag is set to "Various" and each individual song artist is set properly.

Now when I look in the album view I see one album by "Various" and when I look in the artist view I see all of the artists.

I still do not think this is correct behavior. Why should setting the album artist tag have any effect at all when you specifically DO NOT select "Album Artist" as one of the options under "What to consider as an Artist" dialog?

Anyway, since i hijacked my own thread and would like to get it back on track - The Artist tags are case sensitive. "Days of the New" and "Days Of The New" appear as seperate artists and probably should not.

There is also a bug in the tag scanning somewhere since I often get wierd artists like "Paul McCartneyopt_priority". If I "touch" the song and re-scan it usually goes away, but then again sometimes another song that was all OK suddenly appears with a wierd tag with "opt_priority" in it.

It would also be nice if Sage would treat "The Beatles" and "Beatles" as the same artist as mentioned by another poster.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

- When tagging multi-artist albums make sure the "Album Artist" tag is set to "Various" and each individual song artist is set properly.

This is exactly what you should be doing, in terms of tagging.

Now when I look in the album view I see one album by "Various" and when I look in the artist view I see all of the artists.

I still do not think this is correct behavior. Why should setting the album artist tag have any effect at all when you specifically DO NOT select "Album Artist" as one of the options under "What to consider as an Artist" dialog?

This is correct behavior -- as I said in my last post: that option has absolutely nothing to do with how the songs are imported; it only affects how things are listed on the Artists view in the music browser. The music can be imported and the tags read w/o ever even using this music browser, if you were to use a different STV. The Album Artist tag is used to help determine which songs belong to the same album, especially in cases where there are various artists on the same album, or you have albums with the same name by different artists. Before the Album Artist tag was used, if you had multiple "Greatest Hits" albums by different groups, you would end up with a single Greatest Hits album by Various Artists. The Album Artist tag is the way SageTV chose to resolve that issue.

Anyway, since i hijacked my own thread and would like to get it back on track - The Artist tags are case sensitive. "Days of the New" and "Days Of The New" appear as seperate artists and probably should not.

There is also a bug in the tag scanning somewhere since I often get wierd artists like "Paul McCartneyopt_priority". If I "touch" the song and re-scan it usually goes away, but then again sometimes another song that was all OK suddenly appears with a wierd tag with "opt_priority" in it.

You would have to send this feedback to SageTV, since the import process is part of the core.

- Andy

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Your sig line and screen shot indicates you are using v5. Album Artist was added for v6, along with many other music library improvements in the core and in the UI.

- Andy

I'm not using Album Artist, just Artist.

I did once have a couple of albums that were labeled as various rather than with their real artist name and fixed it by cleaning out some extra tags that WMP had put in place. Wm/AlbumArtist or something I think. So I'm pretty sure that spurious tags can cause sage to choke when parsing the music library. Is there a way to find out what's causing sage the problems when it refreshes the library?

Cheers,
Phill

[ke6guj]

When I had issues with my MP3s, I removed all the MP3s from the import folder and refreshed Sage so it had an empty library. Then, with debug logging on, copy over some MP3s and do a refresh. You can see Sage doing the parsing in the logs, and can see where the problems are.