Music - Hit-or-Miss Album Groupings

[RetroBox]

Maybe it is something that I'm doing wrong, but every time I drop a new folder into the music import directory it is hit-or-miss whether songs will group correctly under an album or if they will import as individual albums. I make sure that ID3 tags are consistent and include the same information for v1 and v2 tags - Title, Artist, Album, Year and Genre. Anyone else having a similar issue?

[Opus4]

Make sure the Album Artist tag for all songs on an album are all the same & set correctly.

- Andy

[Rico66]

It's a bit picky, but make sure that the spelling is 100% exact, e.g. different upper-/lowercase spelling results in different albums.

BTW, I recently noticed that a super short track that's only 4 seconds long didn't end up in the correct album. Is there some kind of minimum length?

[RetroBox]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Make sure the Album Artist tag for all songs on an album are all the same & set correctly.

Absolutely correct! I intended to import 3 compilation CD's and did not notice that the Album Artist for the ones that imported correctly had a consistent value of "Various Artists" while each song kept its own Artist.

I guess Music is not Hit-or-Miss if you get the ID3 tags correctly

Thanks!

[sdsean]

I submitted a bug for this as well. . .

It turns out SageTV requires "Album Artist" to be set for a lot of other reasons as well (album art, etc).

Its doing a bit of a poor job when it tries too detect differences between albums (and songs for that matter). I submitted a bug with some code on how to do this properly
but they told me it'd have to wait till 7.1 which I suppose is fine. . .

The thing is you need to do multiple checks / logic. Many files may not have "Album Artist" and re-tagging to solve that is a bit of a pain (especially in my case with ~ 20,000 songs). When I went through the god awful horrible months long project of re-tagging everything properly. . .I purposely avoided fields that were only part of the ID3 1.0 spec b/c lots of players in Cars, and old software don't handle the newer tags format very well, which is why nothing I have as "Album Artist" in it. . .

[RetroBox]

That would actually explain some other issues I've been having. I was not sure if I used "Album Artist" for all my music, because, like you, I like to stick to ID3 v1 tags to ensure compatibility with other players. I took a quick look at my collection, and there is a significant number of albums that have "Album Artist" missing - which Sage groups correctly. The exception I've found is when albums share the same "Album Title", such as Greatest Hits, and have no "Album Artist" specified - song from all ambums with that name are grouped together. Thanks for submitting a fix - I do not want to go through an ID3 update project like you did.