Sorting library by "Album" alone - how to?

[TJT_WA]

If there is a way in the current version/s of Poweramp to revert to the good old way of sorting the library by "Album" alone - where is it, how do i do it ??? 

(Having to cope with thisusing Sonos is bad enough, now Poweramp has become harder as well . . . )

I have about 7500 tracks in a list of about 500 albums, and I don't need my scrolling list to be made even longer by this sort of interference with what should be a simple task.  I don't mess with visualization, album art, playlists and so on, I just wanted to be able to keep listing my library by "Album", NO MATTER WHAT the Artist, Album Artist, Contributing Artists or other "Tags" are - then this would be very good. We do not all want the total experience, some of us are just trying to find the album quickly, then just listen as we do other things for 45 minutes or so - without having to go back and reselect more music after just a track or two.

This has changed in the last few months - it used to be good.

Somewhere in the Settings, I've seen the option so sort the Albums "By name" - here attached, is the screenshot - but it is affected by the other tags. 

If there is a way to do it, please advise - the menus are so complex it's now quite hard to follow.  Thanls!

[andrewilley]

Not quite sure what you may have changed, but if you view the 'Albums' Library Category, and choose 'By Name' as the sort order in its List Options menu, then that's exactly what you should get - a list of all of the Albums in your music collection sorted by album name. The album names obviously need to be correctly indicated within the songs' tag data.

Andre

[6b6561]

Then there is also a bunch of album grouping under Settings -> Library -> Lists. These might have a interesting effect on your category views if you are missing some tags. I believe that my screenshot has the default values, there is also a reset to default option at the end of the settings page.

[TJT_WA]

Thanks. Ideas good, but not effective for the basic problem I think.

Processing it . . . .

I had the "Join albums" button on already. Added the two near the bottom as per your picture - no difference. (Even after a full rescan of the library.)

The situation is - (using the tag labels as seen in Windows Explorer)

Album 1: “Album Artist” varied, “Contributing Artists” all the same value. Gets split.

Album 1 v2: “Album Artist” all blank, “Contributing Artists” varied. Lists OK as 1 album.

 Album 2: “Album Artist” varied, “Contributing Artists” all blank. Gets split.

Album 2 v2: “Album Artist” all blank, “Contributing Artists” varied. Lists OK as 1 album.

(Infuriatingly, the situation with the same formatting in Sonos app is exactly the opposite!!)

Added the other two buttons 2 and 3 in your screenshot - full rescan - No change.

Turned off the "Join albums" button - left the others on - It did not change how these 2 album pairs were listed. But it messed up (split) another in which "Contributing artist" were all the same, and "Album artist" was a mix of 1 value and blanks. So to prevent this, need to have the same value in “Album artist” for all tracks, and no blanks.

Still, these settings should only affect what’s shown – the listing by “Album” (as in my screenshot in 1st post) should ideally be just that, “Album" only. Ideas of how to get this enforced?? Or other setting i may have missed??

 

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, TJT_WA said:

Album 1: “Album Artist” varied, “Contributing Artists” all the same value. Gets split.

Album 1 v2: “Album Artist” all blank, “Contributing Artists” varied. Lists OK as 1 album.

 Album 2: “Album Artist” varied, “Contributing Artists” all blank. Gets split.

Album 2 v2: “Album Artist” all blank, “Contributing Artists” varied. Lists OK as 1 album.

All of these tests have missed the most important factor. In all cases the AlbumArtist field for each Album should always be the same. It is the unique combination of AlbumArtist+Album that allows most media players and managers to separate Albums with the same name. The most common example is "Greatest Hits" that potentially could have 100's of hits in a library.

So in your testing, you need to try;

Album 1: “Album Artist” all the same value, “Contributing Artists” can be varied

[TJT_WA]

Thanks for the response.  However - I disagree with "the most important factor" mentioned.

It seems to me:  If Album and Album Artist are separate fields/tags/data domains, then they should be able to be treated  separately - and that a sort by "Album" should be exactly that.  This is the way Poweramp worked when I first used it. (Ditto Sonos.) 

Why would any computer programmer set his app to have "Album" really mean "Album + Album artist", and not say so?  Or, indeed, give the user an informed choice between the two?  This seems a backward step.

I could list examples where an "Album" title might embrace a few different "Artists" and then within each set, "Contributing artists" might include the orchestra name / conductor / soloists etc etc , but then someone else might say "Well' you should be using "genre" for that . . . and that further complicates things.

 

I know this is not about "Sonos" per se, but the fact that it also currently handles this issue badly, but in a different way, suggests that there is a lot of variation in what people assume these *Artist* labels should be used for.  Simplest solution - make "Album" mean "Album" again.

 

[TJT_WA]

PS - Respectfully, "Greatest hits" as an album title would not be useful.  I'd have an idea whose greatest hits I was after. Ensuring album titles are unique should not be a problem.  Thanks.

[TJT_WA]

13 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Not quite sure what you may have changed, but if you view the 'Albums' Library Category, and choose 'By Name' as the sort order in its List Options menu, then that's exactly what you should get - a list of all of the Albums in your music collection sorted by album name. The album names obviously need to be correctly indicated within the songs' tag data.

Andre

Andree, I agree,this is exactly how it should work. BUT it does not seem to do so - despite having the Album field properly filled - is it a bug?  Could I fix it by reverting to an earlier version? Thanks.

[6b6561]

This is nothing that has changed in PA, and PA is following "industry standard". Tracks are grouped into a album when more than one track shares the same Album Name & Album Artist.

The standard way of tagging a compilation albums is to set the Album Artist to something like Various Artists and the track artist is tagged in what Microsoft calls Contributing artist. And for single artist albums it's a good practice to populate both fields with the artist name.

The correct tag names as defined in http://id3.org/id3v2.3.0 standard:

• TPE1 - The 'Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group' is used for the main artist(s). They are seperated with the "/" character.
• TPE2 - The 'Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment' frame is used for additional information about the performers in the recording. 

Problem here is that it looks like Sonos has goofed up a couple of months ago. I did some googling and found quite a lot of discussions around this topic. One example

If you really think that this is due to a recent PA change, then you can always take the route of installing a older version from https://forum.powerampapp.com/files/

 

[TJT_WA]

OK then - thanks, I think.

Mea culpa maybe - I had not used Poweramp for 2 months till loading it on a new phone.  Maybe, if indeed it hasn't changed, the "problem" albums were just the ones I had had to "Fix" so they worked with Sonos (S2). 

So I know how to force things to work in both apps, but they have to be different.  Either I blank all the artist-related tags, or maintain 2 collections - bah - not happy!!

I still maintain that "Album" sorting should logically be un-influenced by other tags. Another "sort" option, "Album + Artist" could easily be added. Maybe one day someone higher-up will take this seriously - there's been enough time wasted on this for now.

[6b6561]

There is a bug that Sonos caused in mid July and still haven't fixed, there was a new version released a week ago but it didn't address this bug. I would assume that this is something that will be fixed by Sonos and once they do, then you can get rid of the library that you have used as a workaround due to the Sonos issue.

Then back to the other half of this, sorting vs. album.

Album:

What forms an album: an abum is formed by a track sharing "Album Name" and "Album Artist", and that's how it's done in all music players. Otherwise there would be issues with albums such as "Greatest Hits", of which I have nine  in my library of different artists. I have two "IV" by different artists, two "13"...

In other words, there are two tags that comes into play, "Album Name" and "Album Artist", this is used to create the list of Albums in the library.

If things are not properly tagged, then that will result in the very long album lists, typically with duplicate albums where you only have one track per album such as for various artists albums.

Sorting (display);

Sorting comes into play when there is a list of albums that you want to have displayed, and this is the list formed in the previous step. Sort by Name is basically the sorted list of the combination of "Album+Artist".
 

[6b6561]

If Albums wouldn't be formed by "Album+Artist" then I would be pretty upset having Blur and Black Sabbaths tracks mixed up in the album "13". 🙂

[TJT_WA]

Haha! We all have our preferences as to where to spend our efforts, I guess.  Renaming your albums to "13 Black Sabbath" and "13 Blur" would seem easier than what I'm having to do. :)

[6b6561]

Believe me, I know what you are up to... I don't remember how many Albums I had back in 2018... I would guess that I had somewhere between 400-500 albums when I realized that I had done something stupid while ripping and tagging the albums... so been there, done that, got the t-shirt...

You might want to take a look at mp3tag or similar that can do it one go for you, https://community.mp3tag.de/t/convert-tpe1-to-tpe2-leaving-tpe1-blank/5696 PLEASE NOTE: I didn't read through the details in the mp3tag page so I'm not sure if that's the action that you would need, so see it as an example of the mp3tag capabilities.

 

[andrewilley]

5 hours ago, TJT_WA said:

I disagree with "the most important factor" mentioned.

You can disagree all you like, but that won't change the way it actually works. The Album Artist tag is vital in ensuring that all of the songs which should be part of one album are actually grouped together.

For multiple tracks that need to be considered as part of one album entity, the Title and Artist tags can contain anything you like - song artist names can often vary from track to track, such as duets, collaborations, collection albums, etc.

The two tags which control the grouping of songs into albums are Album (the album title) and Album Artist (often the same as some/all of the song artists in simple albums, but could also be "Various Artists", an overall group/band name, an orchestra, etc). Those two tags need to match for each each separate track within the album.

Andre

[MotleyG]

6 hours ago, TJT_WA said:

Respectfully, "Greatest hits" as an album title would not be useful.  I'd have an idea whose greatest hits I was after. Ensuring album titles are unique should not be a problem.

For more examples of how similar Albums names by different Artists would apply, consider "Faith" by George Michael and also by Faith Hill. Another would be "Fallen" by Evanesence and also Stryper.

You can apply your tag structure any way you choose, it is your library. But if you go outside of the expected use cases, you can't expect that players will follow. The AlbumArtist field by design is to keep individual Albums grouped together, exactly as you have asked. Some players haven't even adopted the use of the AlbumArtist tag yet and have trouble isolating Albums for this reason. The Artist field on the other hand is freeform and is used to reflect the performer for each Title on an Album, and can have as many names as required without affecting the Album from splitting.

There are always fringe cases with music, such as you describe with several Artists contributing tracks to a single Album. Typically these are known as Compilations, and there is even a flag field for this that gets set to "1" as an indication that some players recognize. Commonly the AlbumArtist is set to something like "Various Artists" for for these Albums as well. If you want to get creative, you could try to include multiple AlbumArtist tags (I.e. "Willie Nelson; Waylon Jennings" or "Dolly Parton; Kenny Rogers" who together have released a couple of Albums) but this will cause issues with most players that only expect a single value tag here.

[6b6561]

I think my TPE1 TPE2 switch back in 2018 was one of my bigger undertakings in curating my library.

The next thing that hit my library OCD was title cases, I started out my collection with All First Letters In Capital... with capitalized Or's The's... even capitalized Swedish titles which should never be capitalized in such a manner... this is a real turnoff now. I have correct all album titles which is what I normally see but I still have a bunch of song titles to fix, so when I see something wrong, then I screen shot it and fix it when I'm back on my computer...

I fear for what will be the next thing... does it ever end?

[MotleyG]

4 hours ago, 6b6561 said:

I fear for what will be the next thing... does it ever end?

Nope. Never!

I have been working on my library of 27k songs for over 20 years. It has been ripped three times now, but since I went lossless finally there won't be any reason other than catastrophy now. But 4x backups incluing 1 offsite should save me.

I personally recommend mp3tag to handle tag editing. While I am sure there are others that can accomplish the task, mp3tag has been instrumental in helping manage my collection.

[TJT_WA]

I agree, MP3tag is great, has got my library sorted now.  It's just a shame I'll have to fix it again one day I'm sure.  It's a pity programmers are not always pedantic enough about the words they use - seems a little odd, that.

(I'm referring to "Album" meaning "Album + Album artist" )

Maybe I've had more trouble than some because my library is basically hand-made, being MP3 versions of my old LP > Cassette, Cassette > CD, LP > CD,  and CD > CD pile going back to about 1970.  Mainly using Sony SoundForge and Nero. Automated "Ripping" has not been a prominent feature - it get's the names wrong

Now, next target - Sonos!

Thanks all.

[6b6561]

Good to hear that you got it sorted!