Artist name not capitilized if space follows period

[dvhttn]

OK. I  noticed that one artist in my collection, under the 'Artist' view, was down as 'T.g. Sheppard'. As this knawed at my OCD'ish nature I decided to re-tag it to be correct. Lo and behold it was correct. i.e. the artist tag was 'T.G. Sheppard' (note the space after the second period). I checked with mp3tag, Tagscanner and even Groove music on my PC and they all had it tagged correctly. I checked the same file on the phone and it was also correct there (used mixplorer to get to the file location and it showed the metadata as correct). 

Also, if I use Poweramp to play this song and look at the 'Info/Tags' display this also shows the artist as correct as above. 

I copied the file and changed the artist tag to be 'T.G.Sheppard' (no space after the second period!) and this time the artist view (after a 'rescan' of course) was also correct. So it appears that the artist view can be upset by a period followed by a space ..... 

The views I have noticed to be wrong are, as said, the artist view and, on the main player screen where you have the bar that has a left/right/left animation of the artist name and album name.

The question is, is this a minor bug or is there some setting that can alter how this character combination is interpreted?

I have test files I could send but this seems fairly trivial to reproduce.

Phone is a Note9 running Android 12 and Poweramp is version 939. Oh, and a screenshot is attached to show what I mean.

Thanks.

Dave

Edited June 11, 2022 by dvhttn
Added screenshot.

[andrewilley]

Do a FULL Rescan (in Settings=>Library) to remove any old content and reload the newly retagged file.

Andre

[dvhttn]

4 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Do a FULL Rescan (in Settings=>Library) to remove any old content and reload the newly retagged file.

Andre

Did that several times (the above was AFTER this). Also cleared cache from PA and the Unlocker. No difference. The only difference was after I removed the space after the period ..... 

[andrewilley]

I've got a few songs with artist names in that format, for example "B.A. Robertson", "K.D. Lang" and "C.W. McCall" and they all display correctly everywhere - player screen, Artists, etc. i.e. with the two uppercase initials and periods, a space, and the surname.

Is it possible there is an ID3v1 tag alongside the newer ID3v2 version? Does this happen with any other files, or just this one? If this is repeatable for you, could you share the two versions of the file (with and without the space in the artist name) for checking? Thanks.

Andre

[dvhttn]

I wrote a new file with no ID3V1 tags - just V2 and same result. I'll attach the two test files - the 'album name' describes the character configuration (the spelling!).

Oh, I also have a couple of KD Lang songs and they seem fine. One was down as 'KD Lang' so I changed it and all was still OK so I'm a little non-plussed. It could well be some form of tag version mis-match but I'll be beggared as to what.

Appreciate you looking at this.

[maxmp]

@dvhttn Poweramp doesn't change the tag register. Poweramp may use first seen tag as entity name (artist/album/etc.) as internally these tags are not case sensitive, so if Adele if first seen, next ADELE tag will match Adele and you won't see ADELE.

In you case (screenshot) I see two different artists. Poweramp doesn't reinterpret tags (except trailing/ending spaces and "the", "a", "an" articles), so space makes these two tags/artists different.

 

[dvhttn]

8 hours ago, maxmp said:

In you case (screenshot) I see two different artists. Poweramp doesn't reinterpret tags (except trailing/ending spaces and "the", "a", "an" articles), so space makes these two tags/artists different.

 

OK. But this is the same tag, just displayed differently. The tag info displayed by the 3-dot menu is correct, just the display on screen is wrong/different. I can see what you're saying about being 2 different artists and I agree thast should be as it is, just that in this one case the tag is 'T.G.' and I see on display 'T.g.' .....

[andrewilley]

The problem here is that at some point PA has found the artist name formatted as "T.g. Sheppard", and that formatting has been stored as the correct case for displaying this articular artist name. Any subsequent scans which find different capitalisations are being regarded as being by the same artist, and so will be displayed in the same way. For example you wouldn't want a song called "Dancing Queen" by ABBA to be treated as being by a different artist to a file containing the song "Waterloo" by Abba - so as long as everything else is the same (including any spaces and punctuation) PA ignores the case of the letters and displays that artist's name in the manner it was first recorded in the database.

Although a Full Rescan does go back and scan every file again, PA's database still remembers the very first variant of the name that it found - along with some other info to be restored, like ratings for Track Titles. So it will still use the name "T.g. Sheppard", as found in the original database, for any artist tags that contain "T.G. Sheppard", "T.G. sheppard", "t.g. sheppard", etc. Removing the space created a 'new' artist name because that tag's content would be considered as a different string.

To fix this and remove the cached details you'll probably need to go one step further than a Full Rescan and force PA back to a completely emptied database. This could be done with a full app uninstall / reinstall, but it would be less hassle to just remove any ticked entries for your main music locations from the Settings=>Library=>Music Folders list, which will force a Full Rescan without any music, thus resulting in a completely empty database. Then re-tick your required folder(s) again and the next scan will rebuild the whole database entries again - including caching artist names. Note: this will erase any ratings, play counts, etc. so it might be worth backing those up first with Settings=>Export Settings/Data if you want to keep them.

Andre

[dvhttn]

26 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

 

To fix this and remove the cached details, you'll probably need to go one step further than a Full Rescan and force PA back to a completely emptied database. This could be done with a complete app re-install, but it would be less hassle to just remove any ticked entries for your main music locations in the Settings=>Library=>Music Folders list, which will force a Full Rescan without any music thus resulting in a completely empty database. Then re-tick your required folder(s) and the next scan will rebuild the database entries again - including caching artist names. Note: this will erase any ratings, play counts, etc. so it might be worth backing those up first with Settings=>Export Settings/Data.

 

I'll remember that tip. Worked a treat. 'T.g. Sheppard' has been completely banished ......  :-) One proviso though, I had to choose at least one folder or the rescan wouldn't happen. Chose a folder with no files in it so the scan didn't take long .... 

Many thanks for clearing up a very frustrating issue for me (I know, 1st world problems ....) and also the facts about how to really clear the database. You would think that a complete rescan would first initialise the database before re-reading your files .... 

 

Dave

[andrewilley]

Yes, you do need to have at least one folder ticked in the Music Folders list in order to be able to Save the updated list- but it could just be an empty folder, or at least somewhere that does not contain any music files. Hence why I said to remove the ticked entries for your main music locations. Sorry, I could have been clearer there.

A Full Rescan does clear all the files that had previous been scanned, but in order to avoid complaints about wiping ratings/etc, some original data is retained in order to re-match with the newly scanned items. That apparently includes previously logged artist names.

Anyway, all sorted now, glad to have got to the bottom of it.

Andre