solved "Unknown artist"/"Unknown album" even though files have tags. Missing tags also keep changing

[superpangolin]

Thanks heaps for taking a look @maxmp.

Honestly I'm not 100% sure how they're so broken, it seems like most of the affected files would have been ripped from CDs purchased around the same time (somewhere between 2009-2010) so it may have been an issue with the iTunes release around then and my particular configuration. Or it could have been that they've been carried from drive to drive and library to library for so many years. It's odd because I can vividly remember some other albums I bought at the same time as some of these, but their tags are fine... it's inconsistent, the tags seemed to have broken at random.

If I still had the CDs I'd just do them again and be done with this problem, but unfortunately they're in storage in another country.

[walkathon]

Long time user, first time poster, fellow developer, etc.

Onkyo DP-1X (Android 5.1.1) + Poweramp: v3-build-818-play (Full)

I too lost a number of artists + album's file info on the last update. :( 
Some of these were files I’ve had for ages, so the ID3 info was translating just fine in previous Poweramp versions.

Curiously enough, it’s *all* songs of certain artists, and when I dug in deeper, it’s only  currently artists that start w/ A or B (Aimee Mann, Billy Paul) etc.  Not *all* A & B artists but the majority of them.

FWIW, here’s a random couple of unrendered artists’ file info  (ID3 version / encoded with)

Artist ‘B’1
v2.2 / iTunes v3.0.1
??? / iTunes v4.7, QuickTime 6.5.2
??? / iTunes v4.1, QuickTime 6.3

Artist ‘B’2
v2.2 / iTunes 9.2
??? / iTunes v4.6, QuickTime 6.3.1
??? / iTunes v4.1, QuickTime 6.3
??? / iTunes 12.7.2.60

Artist ‘B’3
v2.2 / iTunes v3.0.1
v2.3 / Unknown

FWIW, I found other examples w/ ID3 v2.2 (a ‘W’ artist, for instance) that rendered just fine.  Possible that Poweramp can now only deal w/ so many files in a library, then it just horks when scanning?  I also noticed when I went to beta, play times after selecting a track are now like 9 seconds on my Onkyo … search has similarly come to a crawl. I can deal w/ those but losing artists and albums on display / scanning is zero fun.

Thanks for listening - please lemme know if I can provide more details.

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, walkathon said:

Onkyo DP-1X (Android 5.1.1) + Poweramp: v3-build-818-play (Full)

If you are now on 818 (there was a minor bug with tags in 817) please do a Full Rescan in Settings > Library, and let us know if that helps.

Andre

[walkathon]

Andre, did a full rescan and initially didn't work.

Took out my cards, did a rescan to blank the indexing, reinserted SD cards, ran another full rescan, voila!  Thx for the reply / fix.

[superpangolin]

Don't suppose we have an ETA on updates? We talking weeks? Months?

No hurry, I work/have worked in mobile development (albeit in art/design) so I understand these things can take a while. Just curious.

[blaubär]

15 minutes ago, superpangolin said:

Don't suppose we have an ETA on updates? We talking weeks? Months?

No hurry, I work/have worked in mobile development (albeit in art/design) so I understand these things can take a while. Just curious.

So you have the newest build 819 and Max' changes didn't help all of your files ?

 

[andrewilley]

26 minutes ago, superpangolin said:

Don't suppose we have an ETA on updates? We talking weeks? Months?

There have been three updates released here during the past week, have you installed the latest build (819) and done a Full Rescan - or even as @walkathon suggested, remove storage completely, scan to clear the whole database, and then re-enable storage and scan again?

Andre

[superpangolin]

Signed up for beta and saw there'd been recent updates. Tried Full Rescan on 819 and it pretty much fixed the issue - but unfortunately I still had ONE album that was suffering from missing Artist & Album tags. 

So I removed my microSD, did a Full Rescan, reinserted it and did both another full & regular scan and now it seems to all be fixed! I can't find any missing tags anywhere now. Nice work @maxmp

[suburbansky]

I had a similar yet slightly different problem: For certain albums, all of the tracks were apparently stripped of a number of tags, most notably of the "Album Artist" one - despite being tagged in the exact same fashion as other albums by the same artist. So let's say I had ten albums by The Beatles, all tagged as "Beatles, The" in the "Album Artist" field - while eight or nine would be displayed correctly as such, one or two albums were filed under "Unknown Artist" (album name would be retained, for some reason).

After a bit of digging I figured out that any album using UNICODE tags (utf16) is displayed correctly, but the ones using ISO-8859-1 tags are not properly recognised. I wasn't even aware that such differences exist (they're only displayed in the most miniature way possible in my TagScanner) but apparently they can make a difference. No idea, though, why some of my files are in one code and the rest in the other...

[dooginas]

I'm having this exact problems with some FLAC files I've recently copied over on my Galaxy S20 Ultra.  The files all have tags that are recognized by windows and multiple tag programs (TagScanner and Mp3Tag).  I've tried everything in this topic, from rewriting the files with album art to re-inserting my 512G uSD card and doing a Full Rescan.  I've also took the time and updated one of the files directly in Poweramp, and it did not stick.

I'm using v3-build-871-arm64-play Full Version.

Any other ideas on what to try?

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, dooginas said:

I'm having this exact problems with some FLAC files I've recently copied over on my Galaxy S20 Ultra.

If the text into is visible in Info/Tags for those files, and a FULL Rescan does not help and you are still seeing them as Unknown Album / Artist, please could you send a sample file to Max, ideally using the Send option in the app. Long press on song title and select Send > (Gmail) > gpmaxmpz@gmail.com .

Andre

[dooginas]

33 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

If the text into is visible in Info/Tags for those files, and a FULL Rescan does not help and you are still seeing them as Unknown Album / Artist, please could you send a sample file to Max, ideally using the Send option in the app. Long press on song title and select Send > (Gmail) > gpmaxmpz@gmail.com .

Andre

Just sent a file.  It was converted from a wav to FLAC using SoundConverter in Ubuntu 20.10 in a virtual machine.  In Windows, the tags are seen in file explorer, Mp3tag and TagScanner.

I was able to get around by converting the files in windows using FLAC frontend from https://xiph.org/flac/, which strips the tags, then entering the tags using TagScanner.  Longer process than I wanted, but seems to work.

[SYL]

It looks like I'm having this issue too. I have one flac file showing as unknown artist/album that I tagged using foobar2000 and checked using TagScanner and both appear to have no issue. Windows seems to recognize it fine as well.

I tried what was suggested in this thread by removing the file, full rescan, add file, full rescan but looks like it still won't work. I've tried reapplying the tags using TagScanner but doesn't look like anything has changed.

I'm on version v3-build-874-arm64-play

link to file

[maxmp]

@SYL thanks for the file. This one contains zero-size blocks which are not accepted by rather strict Poweramp tag scanner - added workaround for this for the next builds. 

[SYL]

2 hours ago, maxmp said:

@SYL thanks for the file. This one contains zero-size blocks which are not accepted by rather strict Poweramp tag scanner - added workaround for this for the next builds. 

Thank you for looking at it! So I tagged that file alongside everything else in the album but all the other files turned out fine. Any idea why just that file had issues?

[Saturnalia]

I've read elsewhere (many elsewheres, really) that any music on SD cards will have tags missing. Not sure if there's any workaround to fix this issue, but at the moment, no file editor is able to fix this.

After reading through all the posts, it looked like this was the cause of most of the problems. 

[andrewilley]

28 minutes ago, Saturnalia said:

I've read elsewhere (many elsewheres, really) that any music on SD cards will have tags missing.

Not sure who told you that, but it's completely untrue. SD Cards are just storage areas, they can contain whatever you want them to. If you copy your files properly, using any decent file explorer app or a computer for example, they should be exactly the same as the source files - so if the original files are correctly tagged, the copies should be too. There could be 'content aware' copying/syncing programs around which manipulate the data they are copying, so it might be wise to avoid using them if they are messing up your files.

Andre

[MotleyG]

4 hours ago, Saturnalia said:

I've read elsewhere (many elsewheres, really) that any music on SD cards will have tags missing. Not sure if there's any workaround to fix this issue, but at the moment, no file editor is able to fix this.

After reading through all the posts, it looked like this was the cause of most of the problems. 

I have a 400GB SanDisk microSD card with 25k+ songs. All tags work as expected with PA and other players.

[6b6561]

I'm one of the users that had problems with the "Unknown" blank tags for files added to my SD-card on one of my devices.

• The files as such where fine, as the tags where properly read if the folder on the SD-card where renamed, or I did a full re-scan of the library.
• The issue might have been caused by Poweramp scanning the file before it where fully copied to the device or it might have been a Android issue.
• I had the issue regardless of how the file where copied to the SD-card.
• Issue where only present on my MiMax 3 phone, no issues on my other devices.

I'm not sure if it where a Poweramp or Android issue as I'm not sure if it where the Android upgrade from 9 to 10 that solved it or a Poweramp update.

Anyway it's fully resolved at least for me, and my 8500+ track library is working with no issues at all on all my devices.

[RaoD]

These steps worked for me on Xiaomi MiA3:

- Downloaded the AutoTagger app (pro version 3.1.3);

- In app configurations, I put tag version ID3 as ID3v2, and the version of ID3v2 tags, I put ID3v2.4;

- So, still using the app, I changed normally the tags of the album with issues (I recommend do this in internal memory instead SD card);

- So I moved the music files from the original folder to another, rescanned with Poweramp and it worked.

 

 

[Baldy67]

Mine that showed up like this were .wma files instead of .mp3 files. I converted them using VLC and they are recognised now.

[Elvaholt]

I had to search for this problem because I have been having this problem, where files slowly disappear or are unplayable by Poweramp, but when I try playing it via another program, or plug it into my computer and play it, it works fine. I found that Poweramp stripped (or masked) the Artist name. After looking through this list, and searching for directories associated with Poweramp, I realized the quickest solution was to uninstall Poweramp, confirm the files associated directly with Poweramp were removed, and then reinstall it.

Now this has only been a problem for the past 3 weeks, prior to it, I didn't experience it. I've been using Poweramp since October. While I know other's problems may not be this, I am suspecting that there is something that happened with the update on January 20th, and I am wondering if it's possible others may have experienced this close to an update. If this is the case, I am wondering if it's something with updates that makes the current version incompatible with previous versions play directories.

[andrewilley]

@Elvaholt Has your device recently had an Android update (perhaps to Android 11)?

Andre

[Ermolaos]

I am having the same problem, with 2588 songs out of 18000 appearing in the unknown artist/unknown album categories despite having normal tags. I noticed the following, if I long-press one of the songs in Poweramp > select "info/tags" >  select "edit tags" and then > select "save" without changing anything, suddenly the tags are read, and the album is moved to the correct artist folder, disappearing from the unknown artist category.

Obviously I cannot do this manually for over 2k songs, but I thought it might be useful to mention this here...

[Fitzian]

3 hours ago, Ermolaos said:

I noticed the following, if I long-press one of the songs in Poweramp > select "info/tags" >  select "edit tags" and then > select "save" without changing anything, suddenly the tags are read, and the album is moved to the correct artist folder, disappearing from the unknown artist category.

This updates the date modified tag in Poweramp database.

Disable all selected folders for your music library, rescan, then once database is cleared, re-grant permissions and do a full re-scan. (Even faster option would be to rename your top level folder containing music).