Use artist in album artist category when the tag is empty

[k4in]

I'm trying Poweramp and so far I like it, I don't know if I'm not finding the option or is a new feature I think it should have, but this is a deal breaker for me as in the app right now if the album artist tag is missing it gets grouped under "unknown artist" instead of falling back to artist tag for correct sorting.

Let's say I have 3 albums of artist A, 2 of them don't have album artist tag but the 3 is a compilation with different artists per song (B C ... Artist) and album artist A. 

Basically I can't access to all the songs of artist A in artist or album artist categories.

At least my previous music player uses the artist tag when album artist is empty in the album artist view.

[andrewilley]

I agree that where there are missing Album Artist tags would make lots of sense to fall back to showing any valid Artist tag, instead of putting the song in an Unknown group. The reverse version is also something to consider, although I think it's pretty unlikely for a file to contain an Album Artist tag but no Artist data.

@maxmp perhaps this could be included when you look at implementing multiple separate entries in the Artist tags? I don't even think it needs to be an option, it could just be the default.

Andre

[DoesNotEql]

Would really love this feature—Album artist tags are useful for albums that have multiple artists for different tracks—but it can be quite tedious to go through an entire library just to add redundant Album Artist tags when they are not needed. Many other music players automatically read the artist over when album artist is blank

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Edited September 2, 2021 by Sinj

[andrewilley]

@Sinj Why not use plain Artists mode then, rather than Album Artists, if your music collection is not tagged that way?

Andre

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Edited September 2, 2021 by Sinj

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Edited September 2, 2021 by Sinj

[andrewilley]

@Sinj That's what the Split Artists feature is for. Set "feat." as one of your splitting terms, then you'd see all the Artist names separately in lists. Worth a try anyway.

Otherwise, just throw all your music into a batch tag editor on a computer and get it to copy the Artist tag to Album Artist for any files where Album Artist is empty. It might take a bit of setting up, but once done you can just set the batch running and leave it to finish. I did all of mine, and I now have almost nothing with empty Album Artist tags.

Andre

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Edited September 2, 2021 by Sinj

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Edited September 2, 2021 by Sinj

[andrewilley]

4 hours ago, Sinj said:

And yeah, I thought about using "Mp3tag" or something to that effect to batch fix it, but I feel very, very bad about automating and potentially ruining my carefully curated collection. Then I'd rather do it manually. But I would prefer a software fix

While I can't rule out a software update happening at some point, this request has been around for a while now. It'd be much easier for you to fix your own files rather than expecting an audio player to plaster over the cracks for you. After all, PA is actually displaying the list absolutely correctly: where you are providing songs with no Album Artist tag, it is correctly reporting that the album artist for those songs is unknown.
 

I can't speak for MP3Tag, but in TagScanner setting up a batch process to fix your files takes just three steps:

1. Drag your whole music folder onto the computer's TagScanner program icon and wait for it to scan through the subfolders and display all your song files. This might take a while with larger collections.
    
2. Open the 'Generate' tab and set the parameters in the right-hand pane as follows:
   
   That tells it to copy content from the Artist tag to the Album Artist tag. Do make sure you set the 'Existing Values' entry to Keep so it won't overwrite any existing Album Artist tags which may be present in your files.
    
3. In the left-hand pane, select all the files that you want to process - most likely just select all. You can click Preview to check that you are happy with the results (and unselect any files you don't want to process) then click Generate and sit back while it does the task.
    

It really is that simple - and you can always make a backup copy of the original files first, in case you are worried it might go wrong. Then copy the new files back to your phone and do a FULL Rescan to update PA's database entries.

Andre

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Edited September 2, 2021 by Sinj

[andrewilley]

@Sinj It's really pretty easy to do - and actually very satisfying to see all those fields properly filled in.  With a big music collection you might have to let it run for a while loading/saving files though, but it'll just get on with it in the background.

Do make good use of that Preview feature though - I'm sure you'll come across an odd album where all the tracks are by the same artist except for one which has a guest collaborator. Obviously the Album Artist tag shouldn't ever have that one-track guest collaborator listed. That kind of one-off thing tends to stick out like a sore thumb when you scroll through the list though, and now is a good time to fix that. 

Andre

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Edited September 2, 2021 by Sinj

[MotleyG]

45 minutes ago, Sinj said:

 

It's pretty infuriating, actually. And there's no way to change it in the settings of MusicBee.

Maybe a request for the MusicBee people then?

[andrewilley]

Having the correct Album Artist tagging is always a good idea - even if all the individual Track Artists tags do happen to be the same. I wonder why MusicBee doesn't just write them anyway, what harm could it do?

Andre