album name Multiple albums with the same name

[viharm]

In my music library, there are two albums from the same artist with the exact same name, but released in different years.

See this link where KSE have released two self-titled albums - first in 2000, then in 2009.

Poweramp combines these two albums together into the same entry in the Artist → Album heirarchy.

Is there a way to tell Poweramp that these are two different albums?

Has anyone else had this issue?

[maxmp]

@viharm Poweramp combines songs into albums based on album name (case insensitive) + album artist or artist tags (case insensitive). Year does not participate in this process. This is mostly due to the year being not reliable for the tracks in the wild, and applying year to the album splitting will break most existing libraries in user unexpected way.

[andrewilley]

Just append the year onto the Title tags - so the titles would become "KSE (2000)" and "KSE (2009)".

Albums can't really be joined based on the Year tag as there can be tracks spanning across multiple years - e.g. collections of singles, or special edition releases where all the original album tracks are from one year but the extra bonus tracks may be from another.

Andre

[viharm]

1 hour ago, maxmp said:

@viharm Poweramp combines songs into albums based on album name (case insensitive) + album artist or artist tags (case insensitive). Year does not participate in this process. This is mostly due to the year being not reliable for the tracks in the wild, and applying year to the album splitting will break most existing libraries in user unexpected way.

OK, understood. Thanks for your prompt response.

 

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

Just append the year onto the Title tags - so the titles would become "KSE (2000)" and "KSE (2009)".

Albums can't really be joined based on the Year tag as there can be tracks spanning across multiple years - e.g. collections of singles, or special edition releases where all the original album tracks are from one year but the extra bonus tracks may be from another.

Andre

OK, understood. Thanks for your prompt response. I appreciate that it can be quite difficult for the logic to address each & every use case. By "tags", you mean the metadata (ID3) tags, right?

I thought about renaming the albums, but it goes against the structure of my library which has thousands of tracks.

I'm wondering if this is a strong enough use case for the developers to come up with a way to address this, without workarounds.

Also, it will be good to know if there are any similar scenarios others have experienced. Or is it only KSE who ran out of Album names  ?

[andrewilley]

Yes, I meant editing the ID3 tags, which is where Poweramp gets its metadata from.

You could try changing the Album Artist tag to include the release year, as that's the tag which causes individual tracks to be grouped into albums. That would slightly muddle up viewing by Album Artist, but the main Title/Artist/Album displays would remain correct.

Andre

[MotleyG]

2 hours ago, viharm said:

I thought about renaming the albums, but it goes against the structure of my library which has thousands of tracks.

Unfortunately without the use of the year tag in the process as mentioned by @maxmp this is currently not possible in PA, as well as most other player and media manager programs. Fortunately this is a very limited problem caused more by the Artist's decision to use the same Album name twice. Peter Gabriel and David Bowie have done the same in the past. In my case I use the SortAlbum tag that is invisible when browsing but allows the library to separate them. But these tags are not currently supported in PA either. Hopefully these Sort tags gets some consideration in the future, as it really does make a difference in cases like this, as well as for many other use cases.

[ihaspei]

happened the same to me with stone temple pilots where they put out a self titled album twice (2010 and 2018).

my solution just was put the year of the second self titled album on the album name tag and problem solved.

 

[andrewilley]

@ihaspei Yes, that was my suggestion too, but @viharm mentioned that he didn't want to do this as it would "go against the structure of [his] library of thousands of tracks".

I can't quite see why it's a problem personally - after all, it's only the contents of one (or two) albums for which you'd need to modify the Title tags. And it gives the added benefit of allowing you to actually identify which one you are listening to or viewing in lists.

I have a number of albums where I've added some extra detail to the Title tag in brackets - e.g. when an album is a remastered version, or is a Special Edition release with extra content.

Andre 

[viharm]

19 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Yes, I meant editing the ID3 tags, which is where Poweramp gets its metadata from.

You could try changing the Album Artist tag to include the release year, as that's the tag which causes individual tracks to be grouped into albums. That would slightly muddle up viewing by Album Artist, but the main Title/Artist/Album displays would remain correct.

Andre

Thanks, I like how you think. However I actually prefer your original suggestion of adding the year in the album name, as it's most relevant there. I realised that until now, I was using the cover art to distinguish between the two albums - which is not a reliable/scalable method (as I've just found 🤪).

[viharm]

17 hours ago, MotleyG said:

Unfortunately without the use of the year tag in the process as mentioned by @maxmp this is currently not possible in PA, as well as most other player and media manager programs. Fortunately this is a very limited problem caused more by the Artist's decision to use the same Album name twice. Peter Gabriel and David Bowie have done the same in the past. In my case I use the SortAlbum tag that is invisible when browsing but allows the library to separate them. But these tags are not currently supported in PA either. Hopefully these Sort tags gets some consideration in the future, as it really does make a difference in cases like this, as well as for many other use cases.

This is very helpful, thanks. Shame that PA doesn't support this tag yet (feature request?).

[viharm]

2 hours ago, ihaspei said:

happened the same to me with stone temple pilots where they put out a self titled album twice (2010 and 2018).

my solution just was put the year of the second self titled album on the album name tag and problem solved.

 

Understood & agreed. Thanks so much for the example (& the screenshots). Very helpful indeed.

This appears to be the consensus as per the previous discussion too :-)

[viharm]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

@ihaspei Yes, that was my suggestion too, but @viharm mentioned that he didn't want to do this as it would "go against the structure of [his] library of thousands of tracks".

I can't quite see why it's a problem personally - after all, it's only the contents of one (or two) albums for which you'd need to modify the Title tags. And it gives the added benefit of allowing you to actually identify which one you are listening to or viewing in lists.

I have a number of albums where I've added some extra detail to the Title tag in brackets - e.g. when an album is a remastered version, or is a Special Edition release with extra content.

Andre 

I concede that this is a reasonable compromise based on the current constraints.

[viharm]

Thanks to all who have jumped in to help. Much appreciated.

[Ash Roarshock]

What I normally do in this situation is substitute one letter for a Unicode letter. They look nearly identical but Poweramp will sort it as a different title.

The two titles below look nearly identical but they are not. I substituted the E in the second title with a Unicode 𝖤. Use compart.com to find Unicode characters that look the same.

KSE and KS𝖤

Edited October 21, 2023 by Ash Roarshock