When I select an album by "Artist" Poweramp displays every song instead of just the album.

[cobaltazule]

This is driving me nuts and is a deal breaker as to whether or not I continue to use Poweramp. I hope someone reading this can help me. When I want to listen to a particular album I go to the menu and select "artist" and make my choice. Then once in "Artist" I select the particular album I want to listen to. However for some albums Poweramp pulls out EVERY song as an indivual album. I have a lot of music on my phone and this makes it extremely frustrationg. To have to wade through hundreds of individual songs to find an atrist or album is just too much. I have been careful in creating  my music files and each Artist is filed seperately with albums sperated in subfolders. What am I doing wrong here? Can someone reading this please help me? I used to love this app. Now after all the updates and changes I am having second thoughts. The one thing I loved most about it was that I could navigate it on a intuitive level. That is now totally gone.

[andrewilley]

Sounds like you may have some mis-tagged songs, where the embedded metadata within the audio files is not correct.

For one of the albums which is not showing correctly for you, long-press on a song title and select 'Info/Tags'. Check that the Title, Artist, Album and Album Artist tags are all entered correctly and match between the different songs in one album. The Album Artist tag is used to collect tracks together into one album entity, especially when the track artist names may vary. A few errors can be corrected within that screen (tap the 'Edit Tags' link) but if there are a lot then a batch tag editor on a PC would make the job a lot easier and quicker.

 

If your music is already arranged neatly by folder, I would suggest in the meantime using the Folders or Folders Hierarchy categories, instead of Artists or Albums.

Andre

[cobaltazule]

Thank you SO much for your suggestions. On my PC I looked at the "propertise" of several of the effested albums and I did find differences. Namely in "contributing artists".  Also to look into this better I have installed Poweramp on an Emulator on my PC. (Phone is just too small!). I am going to try your suggestion and edit the tags using MusicBrainz Picard.  I will keep you posted on the results. Again thank you as now I at least have a direction to persue.

[andrewilley]

Personally, I would suggest a purer tag editor such as TagScanner or MP3Tag on a PC. MusicBrainz does have a habit of trying to do things its own way.

To group multiple tracks into one album, the important tags which need to be the same between each of the songs are Album (i.e. the album title, tag TALB or ALBUM) and Album Artist (tag TPE2 or ALBUMARTIST). The other artist-related tags can vary track by track as you wish, and 'Contributing Artist' is not an official MP3 ID3 tag anyway so won't matter.

Andre

[cobaltazule]

Holy crap it worked!!! Brother you are a freaking genius! Yes MusicBrainz was troubling to use and did not work. So, as per your suggestion, I tried Tagscanner. I had to watch a few Youtube tutorials on how to use it but it worked perfectly. Now my Poweramp works flawlessly. Now I can easily browse through Artist/Album.

Just as you said the issue was due to the different hidden tags on each song which Poweramp read as a seperate artist. Removing those tags was the trick. I had not even known they existed!

Again THANK YOU! You dont know it but you made a huge posituve difference in my life. I use Poweramp at work to make my day go by faster and it was SO frustrating to waste time scrolling through endless songs when I simply wanted to choose an ablum.

FYI: I am sure I am not the only one who had this issue. I am sure there are others who tried Poweramp and then dismissed it for this very reason. Can you make the developer aware of this?  When the issue first appeared, a number of years ago, I had to revert to an ealier version of Poweramp. Version 2.0.10-build-588-uni worked fine until just last year. 

Again Thank you!

[andrewilley]

Glad you got your files sorted. There is a short learning curve with TagScanner but once you are used to it, it's a doddle to batch edit whole albums at a time. You may find other things you want to tidy up while you're at it.  

PA v2 did not support Album Artist tags, which are used in music files to correctly group albums. Instead it used the Album Title and Artist tags, which was never an ideal solution as it either did not allow for albums where the artist details vary track-by-track (e.g. compilations, various artist albums, etc) or it caused problems when different artists released their own albums with the same titles - e.g. the album title "Up" could refer to the Pixar film soundtrack, a Shania Twain album, an R.E.M. album etc. Correctly tagging your music with Album Artist tags solves all of this in v3.

Andre

[MotleyG]

12 hours ago, cobaltazule said:

Just as you said the issue was due to the different hidden tags on each song which Poweramp read as a seperate artist. Removing those tags was the trick. I had not even known they existed!

So we can understand what the issue was, can you share what these hidden tags were named? Removing a tag shouldn’t have fixed the issue if they weren’t tags Poweramp would have looked at.

[andrewilley]

@MotleyG I think it was more likely the addition of Album Artist tags which helped. As you say, extra tags that PA doesn't use are not necessary but certainly should not cause any issues, they'll just be ignored.

Andre

[cobaltazule]

About the tags I removed. As an example, the album Aurora by Breaking Bejamin: when I would go to select "atrists" every song in that album would show up as a seperate artist. In the tags I saw each song on the album had different contributing arists. I just went in and removed that tag then made sure all the songs had the same artist without additional descriptions.

 

[andrewilley]

 

5 hours ago, cobaltazule said:

In the tags I saw each song on the album had different contributing arists. 

That's fine, you can have as many different ARTIST names on one song as you like - which you describe as "contributing artists", although that's not a specific term in either the FLAC/Vorbis or MP3/ID3 specs. Indeed, it's very common for there to be differences between each individual track as to who performed or featured on them - guest singers, featured artists, soloists, etc - and for many albums (compilations, soundtracks, etc) every song could be by a different artist or set of artists.

That is why I said to make sure that the separate ALBUM ARTIST tag is set correctly (i.e. identically) for any tracks that are meant to be from a given album.
 

For multiple artist by the way, the 'Vorbis' tag format (used mainly for FLAC and similar files) allows as many separate ARTIST tags as you like, while the 'ID3' tag format (mainly used for MP3 files) usually has different artist names separated by something like a semicolon or a slash, or even the more modern "feat.". Whatever separator(s) you decide upon though, you can tell PA to show the names of individual people in the Artists list by using PA Settings > Library > Scanner > Symbols to Split Multiple Artists. For what it's worth, I have my symbols set to cover most of the commonly found options as:

So in your example, the tags for each track might look something like this:

Album	Album Artist	Track Title	Artist
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	So Cold	Aurora
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	Failure	Aurora feat. Michael Barnes
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	Far Away	Aurora feat. Scooter Ward
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	Angels Fall	Aurora
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	Red Cold River	Aurora feat. Spencer Chamberlain
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	Tourniquet	Aurora
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	Dance with the Devil	Aurora feat. Adam Gontier
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	Never Again	Aurora
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	Torn in Two	Aurora
Breaking Benjamin	Aurora	Dear Agony	Aurora feat. Lacey Sturm

Andre