singles need a suitable “home”

[jeasin]

I made "Albums" my home page so that I could display all my albums with each click, giving me the feeling of holding a physical CD in my hand. I love this feeling.

But I don't want to give unrecorded singles a separate album box because they only have one song inside. So I didn't put their album information in the music TAB. Therefore, on the albums page, they are shown as "unknown albums". "Unknown Album" doesn't just belong to one artist, it belongs to artists A, B, C...

This is not the most serious, the most serious is when you click on an artist A's homepage, and underneath it will show all of his albums, and of course there will be "unknown albums", which are actually his single releases. However, the cover of this "unknown album" is by artist B or C, even though there are no songs by artist B or C clicked in from here.

It would be great if you could customize the cover of one song on each album as the cover of the entire album. This solves the part that belongs to Artist A's "unknown album", but shows artist B and C's single as the cover.

Now you can also customize the album art. However, when set, all the album covers for Unknown Album were changed to be the same, losing the original cover for the single. This is because by default an album can only have one cover. But if you break that limit, you should be able to.

Also, I attached the picture, I don't know if what I described can make you understand.

Finally, thank you for the excellent player.

[maxmp]

@jeasin so I guess multiple options can be implemented to polish these issues:

• Unknown album -> should be optionally renamed to Singles or should be a customizable label
• "Unknown album" (or some new "Singles" sub-category) should be per artist, so Album art is properly selected

Do I get this right?

[jeasin]

To be honest, I didn't think it was clear enough when I post this issue. But you got the point perfectly. Well, that is. The plan you gave is exactly what I had in mind.

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, maxmp said:

@jeasin so I guess multiple options can be implemented to polish these issues:

• Unknown album -> should be optionally renamed to Singles or should be a customizable label
• "Unknown album" (or some new "Singles" sub-category) should be per artist, so Album art is properly selected

Do I get this right?

@maxmp A third option could be to simply hide the “Unknown” value in any particular list. This could be applied across all values, including Albums, Albumartists, Artists, Composers, etc. There are more reasons a field may be empty than jeering part of a single.

@jeasin Even physical singles tend to have some cover art now. Depending on any other player or music library manager app you may be using, Album is typically one of the “Mandatory” labels that should be completed for best results. My personal method for handling these is to set the Album value to be the same as the main single name. Even if you at least use a common “Singles” name for the Album for all of these songs, and also include the AlbumArtist for them, they can then be separately considered a distinct group within Poweramp.

[jeasin]

30 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

 

@jeasin ... set the Album value to be the same as the main single name. Even if you at least use a common “Singles” name for the Album for all of these songs, and also include the AlbumArtist for them, ...

@MotleyG You're right, the singles do in fact have their own detailed labeling information, including artist, year, genre, and the album they belong to is often its namesake itself.

There's nothing wrong with the software or the songs themselves, it's just that I wanted to present the unlisted singles in a more elegant way.

As you can see, under Artists, there are 10 albums. Yet in fact each album has only one song within it. Thus, 10 singles occupy 10 album grids, which obviously doesn't make much sense. When the number of singles is too high, it takes up more of the album grid, which is also not conducive to looking through other albums.

[andrewilley]

I tag all of my singles with "(Singles)" in both the Album Title and Album Artist tags, so they no longer get incorrectly sorted into an Unknown group. They are not really Unknown, but they are definitely not in an album though.

By the way, I also think any "Unknown" group items in lists should ideally show at the end of the list as an appendix, rather then being hidden alphabetically under "U".

Andre

[jeasin]

On 8/23/2023 at 1:23 AM, andrewilley said:

I tag all of my singles with "(Singles)" in both the Album Title and Album Artist tags, so they no longer get incorrectly sorted into an Unknown group. They are not really Unknown, but they are definitely not in an album though.

@andrewilley Smart choice, cause I used to do it, too. LOL. But the art issue still there. Imagine there are some singles of Taylor, Drake and Alicia and… When you tag all the singles to gather them as a special ‘’singles’’ album. The special album will set its art randomly through one of those singles. But it doesn’t adapt itself to changing circumstances. As a result, artist page of Taylor and her singles album may show art as Avicii’s.

I wonder if we could have separate art for albums that are not associated with their content songs. That would avoid conflicts.

(II'm not a native English speaker and I speak English completely blindly according to my feelings. So there may be a lot of grammatical and presentation errors that cause semantic inconsistencies. But if you guys can understand what I mean, that's really cool. Thanks for your understanding)

[andrewilley]

@jeasin  Currently, Poweramp treats any download ALBUM ART as just that, applying it to the whole of the current album - even if it's a "fake" album, such as in this case for unconnected singles. There isn't a way to assign downloaded artwork to one specific track as yet, although it is in the Frequently Requested Features list.

The only way to do what you want is to embed the required artwork for each track into the actual audio files, using a tag editor program. Then as long as PA doesn't have any manually download artwork to override it, you will see the correct cover for each track. You can remove individual manually downloaded JPEG files by deleting them from the selected_aa  cache folder:

Andre

[Ash Roarshock]

I prefer to name mine B-Sides. That's just an industry term the artist and label usually use for the songs that don't make an album and end up as singles, bonus songs on singles or just stay unreleased.

The issue with naming them is they show up in a random order of the list for each artist if you sort by year or album title. Unless you name them something unique like [Singles] and always sort by album title. It would be better to leave them as unknown and let them sort at the bottom of your lists as a sub category as Max said. Then being able to rename this unknown sub category to whatever you want would be awesome.

[andrewilley]

Personally I think unknown items (where the tag is empty) should stay as "Unknown" - because that's what it is. If you knew the details of what it was, it wouldn't be unknown.  But I've been suggesting for a while that it makes no sense to sort such a group under 'U' where it's hard to find, much better to make it a special item - like an Appendix in a book - at the end of each list.

"B-Sides" wouldn't work for me as most of the songs in my Singles folder are properly A-Sides. Just songs where I don't want the rest of an album (if there ever was an album). I have over 1,000 such tracks, many of which are quite obscure things that fall into the "oh wow, I remember that from the eighties..." category when you hear them on the radio (e.g. "Centre Fold" by J. Geils Band, for which I had no idea if there even was an album until I just looked it up now).

Andre