Merging same artists

[Iko]

Hi there, pls help me:

1. Merge same artists on the player list - like "Beatles" and "The Beatles".  On my folders list it is always like "Beatles".

2. Understand why Album Artists list is short? On other players it displays artists with full albums. It's logical.

 

Thanks

[andrewilley]

"Beatles" and "The Beatles" are different strings of text, and would thus be treated as different artists - in the same way that "Aled Jones" and "Norah Jones" are different people, or "Beatles" and "Beetles" are different groups. Poweramp does group the same words but with different capitalisation though - so "The Beatles" would be considered the same as "the beatles" for sorting purposes.

The Album Artist list is based on an embedded tag called 'Album Artist', which is mostly used to group tracks into one 'Album' entity when the individual songs may be by different artists. If your songs don't contain that tag, they won't appear in that list. Any more than if a song doesn't have a 'Composer' tag then it won't appear in the Composers list.

In both cases though, the fix would be to use a batch tag editor (e.g. TagScanner or MP3Tag on a computer) to fix your tags so they are more consistent.

Andre

[Iko]

I do not know, if I get it.  When loading catalogues (=albums) to the device the folder structure looks as follows.

 

So it is ONE artist and 5 albums.

But inside the folder, the songs are tagged differently - either The Beautiful South, or BEAUTIFUL SOUTH (The).

Can I change it using the apps you mentioned?

Regards

 

[MotleyG]

2 hours ago, Iko said:

I do not know, if I get it.  When loading catalogues (=albums) to the device the folder structure looks as follows.

So it is ONE artist and 5 albums.

But inside the folder, the songs are tagged differently - either The Beautiful South, or BEAUTIFUL SOUTH (The).

Can I change it using the apps you mentioned?

I see two artists and six albums in this example, but perhaps not how I would have them identified. Regardless, the folder and file names have nothing to do with the Album, Artist, or even the Title tags of your music. Even if your files are not well organized in a folder structure, the tags will still help Poweramp list them correctly for browsing in the app.

The apps mentioned by @andrewilley would definitely be a good start to getting your music tagged correctly to support any player, including Poweramp.

On 2/14/2023 at 8:57 AM, andrewilley said:

(e.g. TagScanner or MP3Tag on a computer)

 

[andrewilley]

4 hours ago, Iko said:

But inside the folder, the songs are tagged differently - either The Beautiful South, or BEAUTIFUL SOUTH (The).

The folder layout that you choose to use in your storage is just a handy way for you to organise your files. It not directly used by the music database, and is only really relevant if you choose to view your collection by Folders or Folders Hierarchy.

For all other Music Library features, the music database is generated based on the exact contents of the metadata tags found inside each audio file. So for the Artists of multiple songs to be considered as the same Artist, their tags must consist of identical strings of characters. Thus an Artist tagged in one song file as "The Beautiful South" is assigned as a completely different entity to a song that is tagged as "Beautiful South" or "Beautiful South, The" or "Beautiful South (The)". Capitalisation differences are ignored though, so "THE BEAUTIFUL SOUTH" would still be matched with "The Beautiful South" or "the beautiful south" - although it's neater to be consistent if you can. 

To fix these sorts of problems, I would suggest using computer-based batch tag editing programs such as MP3Tag or TagScanner (both free) which can read multiple folders in one go - even your whole music collection if you allow a bit of time for all the files to be read - and then allow you to correct big blocks at a time, rather than doing it song-by-song in Poweramp's in-built tag editor. 

Andre