Compilations and album art

[will_b_goode]

I'm new to Poweramp and would like my compilations to show the album art but they don't and I haven't been able to get them to after playing around. 

Is there a solution to this? 

[andrewilley]

Do your compilation tracks have their Album Artist tags filled? And do they have embedded cover artwork within the audio files, or are you wanting to download your own?

Andre

[will_b_goode]

Hi, I dont believe they have embedded artwork so have tried downloading. I've put 'various' or 'various - name of compilation' in the album artists section but no luck. I did assign images to some of the artists in the compilation in the artist section, don't know if this had an effect?

[will_b_goode]

I've now found a way to get album art on the compilations but it wasn't intuitive at all and took a long time but now in the album section the compilation shows with the artist name as a random name despite going through each track and changing 'album artist' to "various". I appreciate the app but things aren't clear or intuitive at all 

[MotleyG]

19 minutes ago, will_b_goode said:

I've now found a way to get album art on the compilations but it wasn't intuitive at all and took a long time but now in the album section the compilation shows with the artist name as a random name despite going through each track and changing 'album artist' to "various". I appreciate the app but things aren't clear or intuitive at all 

Perhaps your music files could use a little work first. This is best done on the PC side, where there are more software options that specifically work on metadata tags. Once this is done Poweramp will be able to browse and display your songs far better.

[Fitzian]

35 minutes ago, will_b_goode said:

now in the album section the compilation shows with the artist name as a random name despite going through each track and changing 'album artist' to "various".

I'm in agreement that working with a desktop tool to fix your tags in a neutral and unambiguous environment would be best.

There are still additional options relevant to what I've quoted, here, found in settings-> library-> lists-> (album sub-heading)

There you can choose when or where album artist tags are displayed and used for sorting in lists.

[will_b_goode]

Thanks @Fitzian and @MotleyG , that makes sense. Does anybody have a recommendation for the best tagging tool? Thanks, Will

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, will_b_goode said:

Thanks @Fitzian and @MotleyG , that makes sense. Does anybody have a recommendation for the best tagging tool? Thanks, Will

I use mp3tag myself.

[andrewilley]

I use TagScanner and MP3Tag. They are both good, but I used TagScanner first and just got used to its interface so that's my usual program. Both can handle batch tasks so it's easy to quickly update a whole collection rather than doing it song-by-song which can get really tedious.

[Warning: The following gets a bit into low-level logic]

I guess the key thing to understand about artwork downloaded from within Poweramp is how it is named for storage and later retrieved. If you choose new artwork at the Album level, a JPEG file is saved into the cache folder using the naming convention "%AlbumArtist% - %AlbumTitle%.jpg" (with a slightly messier fallback to using one of the TrackArtist tags instead if there is no overall AlbumArtist tag). If you do the same at the Track level, the file will be named as "%TrackArtist% - %AlbumTitle%.jpg".

There are further fallbacks, such as If there are no Artist details at all the file will be named "%TrackTitle%.jpg", or if there are no tags at all it will be named as simply "%SongFilename%.jpg".

When later viewing your music collection in the Albums category, the album thumbnails and the header artworks will be based on any image file that matches the AlbumArtist/AlbumTitle combination (again, with a fallback to using a TrackArtist if there are no AlbumArtist details). At the individual track level, the TrackArtist/AlbumTitle image will be searched for. So if you've previously changed the artwork for just one track, that new artwork will be displayed for any song which has the exact same AlbumTitle and TrackArtist.

Thus in situations where every track in an album uses the exact same Artist and AlbumArtist tags (which covers most normal artist albums that don't feature guest artists) all of the songs will thus take on the same new artwork. However for a Various Artists album, where each track has a different Track Artist tag, each track could show different artwork.

Here's some more info about how Poweramp uses tags to collate songs into album groupings, and also where and where artwork is cached and the priority ordering that is used to select images.

Andre

 

[will_b_goode]

I used mp3tag to make sure my compilations were tagged uniformly with the same album artist tag etc. However when I go into albums rather than being listed under various artists the albums are listed by a seemingly random artist from the album. This is quite frustrating for me - i really just want to see the comp albums shown in albums under various artists and with their original artwork. 

[Fitzian]

39 minutes ago, will_b_goode said:

I used mp3tag to make sure my compilations were tagged uniformly with the same album artist tag etc. However when I go into albums rather than being listed under various artists the albums are listed by a seemingly random artist from the album. This is quite frustrating for me - i really just want to see the comp albums shown in albums under various artists and with their original artwork. 

See the settings I pointed out earlier, settings-> library-> lists-> (album sub-heading).

[MotleyG]

41 minutes ago, will_b_goode said:

I used mp3tag to make sure my compilations were tagged uniformly with the same album artist tag etc. However when I go into albums rather than being listed under various artists the albums are listed by a seemingly random artist from the album.

Without a specific example or screenshot it is really difficult to help. You mentioned you uniformly tagged Albumartist. But did you also add the appropriate Album name for each group of tracks? There needs to be a consistent method that Poweramp can use to separate these logically. There is no guessing.  

Edited January 28 by MotleyG

[andrewilley]

After copying the changed files back to your phone, do a Full Rescan in Settings=>Library to make sure all the changes are picked up.

If you wish to see the Album Artist name (e.g. "Various Artists") displayed in the Albums Category view, rather than just seeing one of the individual artist names, enable Settings=>Library=>Lists=>'Album Artist Label for Albums' , as mentioned earlier by @Fitzian . For example, in the Albums category view, I then see this sort of info when a 'Various Artists' album is shown:

Otherwise, we're going to need much more detail on exactly what you are seeing at each Category view level, and what you feel the problem is. Perhaps with some screenshots.

Andre