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Use "Artist" tag in "Album Artist" category when "Album Artist" tag is empty


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Noticed that the Album Artist category just throws anything that lacks an Album Artist tag into an "Unknown" folder... It would be really helpful for Poweramp to just automatically read over the Artist tag if no Album Artist tag is present, like many other players do. This way, it would be easy to just use the Album Artist category without having to flip back and forth between it and the normal Artist category.

After all, for albums that only have one artist name, it would be rather tedious to go through and add Album Artist tags for every single one.

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I agree, I suggested this as an option a while ago. For completeness, there probably should also be an option for the (rarer, but possible) case of missing Artist tags to use the Album Artist entry. Not sure if such options should be in the Scanner or Lists settings menu, I think Scanner might make more sense

Andre

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It seems like it would be a fairly simple feature to add and would be a really simple (but impactful) quality-of-life improvement. For such a feature-rich, well-made, and complex app, this is probably the only actual complaint I have about it at all.

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  • 1 month later...

This is also a simple fix in most tag editors to do in a batch. Just search for all files without the AlbumArtist tag, then have those files copy the Artist tag to the AlbumArtist. This is the most simple approach. However it potentially jeopardizes your compilation albums that should have an AlbumArtist tag like “Various Artists” in those cases. But these are things Poweramp can’t assume, and as a player I don’t think it should be expected to manage your library tags.

Edited by MotleyG
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I agree that the underlying issue here is with the files rather than the app. Poweramp is acting quite correctly by putting any songs that don't have any Album Artist information into a grouping for 'Unknown Album Artist'.

Fixing the files properly in the meantime is a doddle on a computer though, the whole thing can be done in TagScanner in three very simple steps, as I just mentioned in another thread where @Sinj also asked the same question:

 

However from a coding point of view, I can't see that it would be too complex to implement an optional fall-back to use the Artist tag whenever Album Artist is not present - and vice versa, but that would be a rarer issue.

Also @maxmp if you do decide to implement this, could you also make a very minor change to the alpha sorting of all the 'Unknown' entries in Categories so they appear as appendixes at the end of the sorted alphabetical listings rather than getting lost two-thirds of the way down under 'U'? Simply renaming the item to start with a square bracket - "[Unknown Artist]", "[Unknown Album]", etc - should do it. I can't see any need for a Setting option for it, just change the names and people will work it out.

Andre

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3 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Also @maxmp if you do decide to implement this, could you also make a very minor change to the alpha sorting of all the 'Unknown' entries in Categories so they appear as appendixes at the end of the sorted alphabetical listings rather than getting lost two-thirds of the way down under 'U'? Simply renaming the item to start with a square bracket - "[Unknown Artist]", "[Unknown Album]", etc - should do it. I can't see any need for a Setting option for it, just change the names and people will work it out.

Or have an option switch to ignore “Unknown” types?

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8 hours ago, MotleyG said:

Or have an option switch to ignore “Unknown” types?

Could work, but that would omit a lot of songs from categories which are meant to just present a different way to view the whole music library.

That is how 'Years' apparently works though, there is no 'Unknown Year' entry after all the valid year which would be used to catch any audio files which contain no date information. Personally I'd prefer an 'Unknown' item at the end. 

Andre

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18 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Could work, but that would omit a lot of songs from categories which are meant to just present a different way to view the whole music library.

That is how 'Years' apparently works though, there is no 'Unknown Year' entry after all the valid year which would be used to catch any audio files which contain no date information. Personally I'd prefer an 'Unknown' item at the end. 

Andre

I think that if the user intentionally chooses to not fill a tag, then the library should just ignore it. If the unknown filter has 1000’s of tracks, it isn’t really helpful in my opinion.

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