Album Art messed up and more :-(

[Hogweed]

Been using Poweramp happily since 2014. However, some time in the last couple of weeks or so I think you must have released a completely new version… everything’s kind of screwed up.

I have always viewed my collection by Album List, single column, and that’s the only way I like it. I don’t use playlists. I play one album at a time by clicking on it from this list.

Half the album art is now missing completely; art for some albums has been replaced by the art for one of my compilation albums; and some tracks from within my albums appear to be displayed as separate, one-track-only, “albums”.

Sorry to sound emotional, but this is a disaster. I’m used to doing things a certain way, and now everything’s a mess.

I'll try to attach two screenshots:

(1) showing 2 tracks from my "Compilations" album, now listed as separate "albums", called "Kerosene Hat" & "The Cream of Clapton", but using the album art from my Compilations album, which is where they actually are. I don't have the albums "Kerosene Hat" & "The Cream of Clapton" at all.

(2) showing missing album art - dozens are missing.

Help please?

[andrewilley]

41 minutes ago, Hogweed said:

(1) showing 2 tracks from my "Compilations" album, now listed as separate "albums", called "Kerosene Hat" & "The Cream of Clapton", but using the album art from my Compilations album, which is where they actually are. I don't have the albums "Kerosene Hat" & "The Cream of Clapton" at all.

I'm guessing this will be caused by tags that exist in your music files, but which Poweramp v2 was unable to process correctly (and you were relying on it processing the tags incorrectly). Could you look at the Tags/Info for the one song showning as being in the Kerosene Hat album and see what the Album title, Artist name, and Album Artist name show as?

For the track to be part of an album that you want it to be, the Album title should be "Compilation", the Artist's name should be whoever is actually performing the song (Cracker?), and the Album Artist tag should be something like "Various Artists" or whatever you want to group this collection under. The Album Title and the Album Artist tags need to be the same as for any other tracks that you want to be regarded as belonging to the same compilation album).

Also, check that the 'Join Albums' option is ticked in Settings > Library > Lists, as that will override the default behaviour when there are no Album Artist tags at all, which may solve your problem as it is closer to the way PA v2 behaved.

Andre

[Hogweed]

Thanks. I'll try to attach a screenshot of the file. It appears to be as you say, except for "Album Artist", which doesn't appear to be listed as an option...

PS "Join Albums" was already ticked

[andrewilley]

The Menu > Info/Tags screen in Poweramp for the same song would possibly be more helpful if you could try that.

Andre

[Hogweed]

8 hours ago, andrewilley said:

The Menu > Info/Tags screen in Poweramp for the same song would possibly be more helpful if you could try that.

Andre

Thanks - have tried that and I think it has worked. However, I would have to do it with hundreds of tracks, so it's not really an option.

Can you please advise how to revert to the version before these changes took place?

Thanks

[Hogweed]

Actually… no, it hasn’t worked. What it does, for each track I do this to, is create a new album called “Compilations”, and put it at the bottom of the alphabetical list of albums, despite it beginning with “C”.

So I tried it for two tracks – results below.

The actual Compilations album, containing 217 tracks, isn't displayed in the list at all!

[andrewilley]

Which category view are you using, Albums, Albums by Artist, or Album Artist? (I know, it can get a bit confusing sometimes - one of the perennial problems of 'power' apps rather than the generic stock stuff is all the extra configuration options can get a bit overwhelming. even for expert users).

Did you find if all your songs have Album Artist tags by the way? Editing multiple songs to add Album Artist tags in one go is a doddle using a batch tag editor incidentally, I use TagScanner on my PC but there are lots around. That is the correct way to ensure that multiple tracks with different artists get grouped correctly, and you ideally shouldn't just rely on just the Album Title being the same - otherwise three different albums entitled simply "Greatest Hits", but by Queen, Bruce Springsteen and the Spice Girls, would all end up being considered as being one large compilation album! (This was always a problem with PA v2, until the newer versions where Album Artist tags are properly parsed)

Finally, if you really don't get on with the new Poweramp options (and please give them a good try first) you can always re-install v2 as you asked. It's available from the Downloads tab at the top of this page (you'll need to uninstall v3 first, and also turn off Auto-Updates in Google Play so it doesn't just reload v3 for you)

Andre 

[Hogweed]

Thanks Andre, I'll try messing about with it a bit more, now that I know I can finally get back to V2 if I have to.

And I can appreciate that all this is probably because I've accumulated thousands of tracks, from many different sources, over many years, and half the tags are going to be wrong as you say... we'll see...

[invaderzim]

I use mp3tag in my pc for editing tags so that the tracks in a compilation album will have the same information particularly for Album Artist, while for missing Artist or other tags, I just add info as needed. Once this has been modified, I will then upload to my sd storage/phone. Hope this will be helpful for you. 

[Hogweed]

2 hours ago, invaderzim said:

I use mp3tag in my pc for editing tags so that the tracks in a compilation album will have the same information particularly for Album Artist, while for missing Artist or other tags, I just add info as needed. Once this has been modified, I will then upload to my sd storage/phone. Hope this will be helpful for you. 

Thanks but by accident, I discovered that I could restore everything to (almost) normal by enabling FOLDER view, as that's how the actual files are organised.

However, for some reason, Poweramp refuses to pick up a significant number of the albumart.pamp thumbnail files, so I've spent several hours downloading the relevant pictures, resizing them, putting them in all the folders, and getting each album to pick them up... sigh... but I think we're there now.

That utility might be useful in the future, though 😉

 

[andrewilley]

13 minutes ago, Hogweed said:

Thanks but by accident, I discovered that I could restore everything to (almost) normal by enabling FOLDER view, as that's how the actual files are organised.

However, for some reason, Poweramp refuses to pick up a significant number of the albumart.pamp thumbnail files

I use folder sorting almost all the time. I'm rather old-school in that respect, but I like to be able to control exactly how things appear by adjusting the folder names (for example within an Artist folder I rename each album to include the four-digit year at the beginning of the name, as that's how I want them sorted).

I don't think the albumart.pamp filename has been supported for 4 or 5 years now (a bit too convoluted, people got confused about why PA was creating them in their music folders - see https://forum.powerampapp.com/topic/7005-poweramp-and-album-art-file/?do=findComment&comment=26195) so if you just rename any .pamp extenders to .jpg then they should get picked up. Check that Settings > Album Art > Prefer Downloaded Album Art is turned off.

Andre

[Hogweed]

25 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I use folder sorting almost all the time. I'm rather old-school in that respect, but I like to be able to control exactly how things appear by adjusting the folder names (for example within an Artist folder I rename each album to include the four-digit year at the beginning of the name, as that's how I want them sorted).

I don't think the albumart.pamp filename has been supported for 4 or 5 years now (a bit too convoluted, people got confused about why PA was creating them in their music folders - see

Andre

D’Oh!!! That’s how I’ve ALWAYS preferred to do it, but felt the world had left me behind when I got my first smartphone some years ago, and found that the phone manufacturers simply would not let me do it my way. Actually, the main psychological damage came from the fact that my first smartphone was a ******* iPhone, on which NOTHING was done in any way that a human being could relate to, but specifically iTunes – surely the worst piece of software ever written – and I spent weeks learning about tags etc, which seemed completely irrelevant to me, as I just wanted to treat my songs & albums as the files and folders they were, rather than something weird. But Apple won’t let you do that – Android comes closer, thank God.

Okily dokily, neighbourinos… think we’re practically there 😀

And thanks for the tip about the pamp thingies too 😉

[andrewilley]

17 minutes ago, Hogweed said:

Actually, the main psychological damage came from the fact that my first smartphone was a ******* iPhone, on which NOTHING was done in any way that a human being could relate to, but specifically iTunes – surely the worst piece of software ever written – and I spent weeks learning about tags etc, which seemed completely irrelevant to me, as I just wanted to treat my songs & albums as the files and folders they were, rather than something weird. But Apple won’t let you do that

I could have written that paragraph myself.  I hate the Apple manta of "do it our way because it's the only way" and I completely refuse to have iTunes on any of my devices or computers. A lot of my music collection has no usable tags at all in fact (quite a lot of obscure theme park background loops for example) and folders and suitable filenames are a much better way to handle them.

I had to do something as simple as copy about 300 Xmas MP3s onto a friend's iPad for a Christmas house-party a few weeks ago, and you basically can't do it - even after I reluctantly gave in and temporarily put iTunes on a laptop.  After a couple of hours of trying, I gave up and asked if I could put the songs onto their Android phone instead, which took about a minute to drag-and-drop with a USB cable, and the whole lot was playing via wireless speakers a few seconds later. 

Andre

[Hogweed]

Hello, Mr Apple? You reckon you're the ultimate... ummm... everything?

And, in your main music app, you can't drag and drop???

I used to fix computers for a living, and refused to have anything to do with Apple machinery, for a variety of reasons - this guy came to me, practically in tears, with his big 24" iMac, whose hard disk had popped. He'd been quoted hundreds of pounds to fix it.

A new disk, in those days, was about £55; should have been ½ an hour to replace the old one, then whatever to reinstall OSX and restore his backup. Not the biggest job in the world. However...

I don’t know how familiar you are with Mac hardware, but it took me ages to figure out how to get into the damn thing – no screws anywhere. Eventually, on a forum I discovered that the front glass is held in with magnets – you just pull it off using big suckers (it’s very thin, very fragile, and is extremely wobbly but doesn't like bending…), then all the gubbins is in there. Oh, and do this in a NASA-standard clean room, or you’ll get all white dots of dust on the back of the glass when you replace it…

But that wasn’t the REAL annoyance. On any computer, you can buy any hard disk (of a size it can cope with, and with the right physical interface – and they’re all the same for any given few years) and just whack it in. But not the iMac, oh no. It actually interrogates the disk’s firmware, ensures it’s the right model, by the right manufacturer – THEN maybe it’ll deign to see it.

Fortunately I discovered that on the forum too, before making a fool of myself 😄