Poweramp does not properly sequence tracks of multi-folder albums

[spacegator]

I have a lot of albums in my library that are multi-disc live albums and each disc is in a separate subfolder.   I cannot figure out how to display the track numbers in proper sequence (starting with disc 1, track 1, etc).   Instead its grouping by track number and then sorting alphabetically by track title among the tracks that have the same number.

I.e.

(track 1 disc 2)  "A Song"

(track 1 disc 1) "B song"

(track 1 disc 3) "C song"

(track 2 disc 3) "A song"

(track 1 disc 1) "B song"

(track 1 disc 2) "C song"

 

Going to "List Options" -> Sort by "disc and track #" does not solve the problem.   Are there other settings I am missing?

[invaderzim]

Have you tried sorting by Album? How are you playing your tracks, from which Library? ie, Album Artists

[andrewilley]

Check that the music files are correctly TAGGED with both Track# and Disc# tags (view Info/Tags to see what is saved in the file). Then PA should be able to sort them correctly in tag-based views such as Albums, Artists, etc.

If you want to use folder/filename sorting, there is no need to keep each disc in a separate subfolder now. Instead, name multi-disc album files as "1-01 Track A", "1-02 Track B", "1-03 Track C", "2-01 Track D", "2-02 Track E", "2-03 Track F", "3-01 Track G", etc.

Andre

[spacegator]

4 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Check that the music files are correctly TAGGED with both Track# and Disc# tags (view Info/Tags to see what is saved in the file). Then PA should be able to sort them correctly in tag-based views such as Albums, Artists, etc.

If you want to use folder/filename sorting, there is no need to keep each disc in a separate subfolder now. Instead, name multi-disc album files as "1-01 Track A", "1-02 Track B", "1-03 Track C", "2-01 Track D", "2-02 Track E", "2-03 Track F", "3-01 Track G", etc.

Andre

I double-checked all the tags and they are proper.   The files in folder "CD 01" are all tagged disc 1, "CD 02" files are disc 2, etc etc.  The track count starts over at 1 for each disc.   When browsing collection via Library -> Albums,  Poweramp is still not displaying the proper sequence and instead is sorting by track # and then alphabetically by title name amongst the files with the same track number. 

What's strange is some of my multi-folder albums have this problem in Poweramp and some don't.  They all basically have the same tagging structure and some are displayed in the correct sequence, but some other albums are not, and I see no difference in how the files are tagged, yet Poweramp does not sequence them uniformly.  

When I open a different music app (BlackPlayer), there are no discrepancies on how the tracks are sequenced between the various albums. 

[invaderzim]

@spacegator try Library > Album Artists > This sub-level will list all Albums of the same Album Artist > at the top you will see All Album Artists Songs. From here set List Options to sort by Album. The only frowning detail here is that PA sorts this alphabetically but the Track #s appear correctly. But, before doing so set first the List settings. See below image.

 

[w3wilkes]

I use a single folder for multi-disc sets. Tracks are file system named;

Disc 1 01 <track title>

Disc 1 02 <track title>

...

Disc 2 01 <track name>

...

Then in my tagging I just set disc number to the disc number and the track to the track number with identical Album names and it gets treated as a single album with all tracks in the correct order from both a music player application and a file manger view.

[andrewilley]

Might be worth doing a FULL Rescan, in case some of the metadata tags have not been read correctly? Tapping the 'Info/Tags' option re-reads the info again directly from the file, it does not show the info that PA already holds in its internal music database.

To see what's actually in the database, go to Settings > Library > Lists and make sure 'Show Disc' is enabled. If you also set 'Show Track Number' as 'In the Meta', then when you browse an Album in any of the List modes, you should see both the Track# and Disc# displayed next to the  file's running time and audio-format info:

As you can see above, the album is being correctly sorted by Disc# first then by Track#.

As a side-note by the way, I'm not quite sure why List Options shows 'By Track#' and 'By Disc and Track#' as two separate options at all, as in any testing I've done they both seem to do the same thing (i.e. disc first, then track). I honestly can't see any reason why anyone would ever want songs in multi-disc albums to be sorted by Track# only anyway, that was always looked on as a bug before Disc# tags were recognised, so not sure why the two options are even there.

Andre

[chadfranklin47]

Now I'm just confused. I'm having a similar issue. I did the full rescan, but tracks that I have tagged as Discnumber: "2/2" are being shown in Poweramp as Disc 1. Have no idea what could be going on. Both discs are in separate folders. The files are AAC.

[andrewilley]

@chadfranklin47 The folder names you choose are irrelevant to the Disc# tag, they are only used for Folder sorting.

If you have created a Disc Number tag in an audio file, it should show as Disc# in Poweramp. What do you see in Info/Tags for the songs in question, it should look something like this:

Andre

[drftr]

I've had this with other players in the past and got around it by putting the disk number behind the title. So I have:

 

Songs In The Key Of Life [1]

Songs In The Key Of Life [2]

 

In addition to that I fill in disk info like 1/2 and 2/2.

 

Hope you'll find the underlying problem though...

 

drftr

[chadfranklin47]

I have attached a screenshot showing what I see in Poweramp as well as another screenshot for what the track shows in mp3tag.

I have seen other people do that, but I would prefer to have the album under one title.

I have another pressing issue though. Is it possible for Poweramp to change my audio tags? After doing the full rescan, I notice that many of my albums have had the artist tag prepended to the album artist tag (when the album artist differed from the artist tag). For example, if the album artist tag was "Yoko Kanno", and the artist tag was "Steve Conte", the album artist is now "Steve Conte\\Yoko Kanno". This is causing what should be one album to appear as several albums as they have different album artist tags and is messing up my phone music library. It didn't do this for all albums though, I'm not sure of the total extent of the issue yet, but it's looking like a lot of work to go through and fix. I would like to know if (and how) I can avoid this issue in the future.

[MotleyG]

It looks like this is a m4a file, I don’t think that format for track number and title accepts the 2/2 tag. You need to define separately the %discnumber% as 2 and %totaldiscs% as 2 in the case of your example in mp3tag.

For the issue with the Artist and AlbumArtist tags combining, are you sure these aren’t duplicate tags in the metadata? Poweramp doesn’t do any tag changes while scanning, so I suspect it may be in this area that something may be up. That is what I would look for.

 

[andrewilley]

@chadfranklin47 try setting the Disc number to 2, not 2/2. Tagscanner for example allows you to set the DiscNumber independently from TotalDiscs. MP3Tag shows those items as 2/2, but that's not what should be stored in the file.

PA can't merge tags - apart from when there are multiple instances of the same tag name (e.g. in Vorbis tags) which is usually annotated in MP3Tag by the syntax "\\" between two names.

Andre

[chadfranklin47]

Thanks @MotleyG & @andrewilley. TagScanner seems to provide a better interface for editing those tags. I should be good there, though it may take a few days of fixing that for all my albums. As for the AlbumArtist problem, I looked into "duplicate tags" and in my source flac files (the files that I converted to m4a before dragging the m4a onto my phone), they do seem to have a duplicate AlbumArtist tag. One being "AlbumArtist", and the other being "Album Artist". It seems converting to m4a, the duplicate tag was chosen rather than the one I was seeing in mp3tag. Which should I delete? The one with the space or the one without? Does it matter? Thanks for the help so far.

[andrewilley]

I think Album Artist (with the space) is the normal one, but I'd need to check that when I get home later.

You can load thousands of files into TagScanner at once, and display them sorted and grouped by whatever columns you want (I use folders, but Album would be fine too). You can add info columns the list view, to see them all neatly laid out as a grid which makes spotting where things have gone wrong really easy. You can cut'n'paste within the grid, or select blocks to take the same 'Save' action on. You can even write commands to copy one tag to another, e.g. copy content after "/" in your Disc# field to the Total Diecs tag.

Multiple file load/save tasks can take a while.

Andre

[drftr]

Anyone aware of a great Android-based app for editing tags? Like many things on Android they all seem to suck one way or the other.

 

drftr

[andrewilley]

@drftr I know of AutoTagger, but it's nowhere near as well featured or usable as a decent computer app. A small touch screen with no physical keyboard is not the ideal way to do batch editing.

Andre

[drftr]

4 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

@drftr I know of AutoTagger, but it's nowhere near as well featured or usable as a decent computer app. A small touch screen with no physical keyboard is not the ideal way to do batch editing.

Andre

I know... But since I'm permanently travelling I'd like to get rid of my tablet sooner rather than later. So I'm looking for the best compromise. It doesn't have to do anything more than iTunes really. I'll add Auto Tagger to my shortlist and hope others throw in comparable or better options.

 

drftr

[andrewilley]

 

18 hours ago, chadfranklin47 said:

 I looked into "duplicate tags" and in my source flac files (the files that I converted to m4a before dragging the m4a onto my phone

I just noticed this part of your message. M4A (AAC) is a format we're kinda stuck with for audio that has come from iTunes, but if you have it as FLAC in the first place why not convert it to something better supported standards-wise? AFAIK, Apple never published their tagging spec, people just reverse-engineered it.

The internal tag encoding does appear to be 'ALBUMARTIST' (without the space) by the way, but most tag editors show that via their regular 'Album Artist' field. Is there perhaps an MP4 style tag and also some other tag data? (bottom/right area of TagScanner should tell you all the tagging formats found in the file). The disc details are stored separately in tags 'DISC' and 'TOTALDISCS'.

As a test, it might even be worth simply re-saving one of the problem tracks without making any changes using TagScanner - it may clean up the data and write it out correctly?

Andre

[MotleyG]

All of my m4a files index correctly, using AlbumArtist (no space) as the correct tag in mp3tag.