One album only showing up as a folder, nowhere to be found in the album list. All other files show up fine. WTF???

[Gooseknuckle]

I had a 2-track album in my library and replaced the files with higher quality 24bit. All the tags are the exact same as before, but these new files won't show up in the album list now. They only show up in the folder list.

The original files were 16bit wav, the new ones are 24bit wav.

I don't understand what could be causing this. There is literally no difference between the files other than the new ones being a higher bit depth, but for some reason they won't show up as an album no matter what I do???

This is really getting on my nerves. It's such a ridiculous problem and I can't for the life of me figure what is going wrong. If anyone's had similar issues please share any fixes or workarounds. Much thanks.

[Gooseknuckle]

Issue resolved. Turns out the files were inside another album with the same name.

The artist released two self-titled albums on different labels. Changing the album title seemed to fix it as it's no longer a duplicate album name. Even though dupe album names shouldn't be a problem since I had a publisher tag field filled in to distinguish them??? Whatever.

 

[MotleyG]

20 minutes ago, Gooseknuckle said:

Even though dupe album names shouldn't be a problem since I had a publisher tag field filled in to distinguish them???.

The publisher tag isn't recognized by most players. So it won't help differentiate matching AlbumArtist and Album in this case. If keeping both, at least for testing, I usually add something like [24bit] or [Hi-Res] on the end of the Album tag.

[andrewilley]

AS @MotleyG  says, there are a hundred or so potential ID3 tags (plus many more custom-defined TXXX ones) so no player uses them all. PA does not use, or even read, Publisher for example.

For a song to be considered part of one album, only the Album Title and Album Artist tags are referenced. If they match perfectly to another song, the songs are grouped together into one 'album' in the lists. If no Album Artist tag exists, the Track Artist tag is checked instead, but that can cause all sorts of issues with collection albums where each track might have its own artist details, or where a couple of tracks contain extra collaborative artists.

So yes, appending something to the Album Title tag is the correct way to differentiate two releases - and anyway, you presumably want to be able to see which one you are currently playing in the Player screen too.

Oh, and using WAV files is a bit wasteful on a phone. I would suggest batch-converting them to FLAC instead, which is still lossless but generates much more manageable file sizes.

Andre