Split albums by folder.

[Dijem]

Different albums with same release date, artist and name mix into the one.

I know there is folders hierarchy option, but sometimes folders don't have album name. Mines are [year][catalognumber] Album - Artist. 

Many players have this option, like symfonium, It will be very nice of you if you will add this in the future.

[andrewilley]

When viewing songs using the 'Albums' category, Poweramp does not care which folders the files happen to be located in. It only uses the Album name and the Album Artist tag (not the Track Artist tag). As long as those two are the same across different files, the songs will be treated as being in the same Album. Year is irrelevant too.

Andre

[Dijem]

So there is no other way to split them without changing the album name? 

I just don't understand why this problem is solved in other players but not in Poweramp? 

[Dijem]

@andrewilley What if add function to use album name tag, not folder name in folders hierarchy option?

This might be the best solution for this situation

[andrewilley]

If you use Folders Heirarchy, you will see lists of the contents of folders, regardless of any tags that may or may not be present (there don't need to be any tags at all in fact). It's one of those "does what it says on the tin" moments really.

But in the other tag-based categories, the Album name must be the same for each song in an album. If there are no Album Artist tags, the track Artist tag is used as a fallback, but that's very messy and fails as soon as you have different artist names on different tracks (such as collaborations, duets, collections, etc). 

Andre

[MotleyG]

5 hours ago, Dijem said:

So there is no other way to split them without changing the album name

If all of these trouble files are supposed to be from a different album, why wouldn't you have the Album tag populated? That is the whole point of using metadata in music files. That is how Poweramp is built. Who cares how any other app does it, they aren't Poweramp.

[andrewilley]

And to be honest, I can't see much justification for this example of how another app works to categorise Albums:

Splitting whole Albums by various tags such as Year or Composer, or even Folder, seems pointless - I don't want an album defined as being every track in my library that was released in 2020 for example. Of course Poweramp does already have the ability to show your music library based on all those criteria (and lots more) but it correctly describes those Category choices as 'Year', 'Composer', 'Folder', etc:

Such list are definitely not 'Albums' though, as that term has a very specific meaning in terms of arranging music collections.

Andre

[Bencherished]

@Dijem (Different albums with same release date, artist and name mix into the one.) I don't see why an artist will have 2 albums, released the same year, same title, with nothing to differentiate them, like EP, DELUXE Version, EXTENDED EDITION, CLEAN/EXPLICIT or even DISC 1/2?

Just set the tags right, I believe Poweramp will sort them accordingly. 

Bencherished

[Dijem]

@Bencherished One is vinyl version, one is cd. They have different tracks and different catalog numbers, but same album name, year, etc. 

I think I will just use invisible symbols in tags to split them, no other ways to do this. 

[6b6561]

It looks like @Dijem has a lot of tracks sitting directly in the /Music folder without a folder hierarchy, and the file naming scheme is "[year][catalognumber] Album - Artist". This results in all tracks being displayed as they are. The Folder Hierarchy view is more or less just a list of all folders / tracks.

What is your current sort order? Maybe a different sort order would be better?

 

[6b6561]

5 minutes ago, Dijem said:

One is vinyl version, one is cd.

I have the same problem as I have some albums both as .mp3 and .flac versions. What I did was that I appended (flac) to the album name. Invisible characters is a good idea, but you will still have duplicate albums in the tag driven categories.
If you are mainly using Folder Hierarchy view, then it would probably be an alternative to create separate folders for the different formats.

[6b6561]

Basically the same applies for Special Edition albums with additional material, Remastered Versions etc.

IMHO it looks quite ugly to append something like "Special Edition With Interviews" to a album name... so I have opted to use just the album name regardless of if it's a original version or remastered.

[Bencherished]

8 minutes ago, 6b6561 said:

IMHO it looks quite ugly to append something like "Special Edition With Interviews" to a album name... so I have opted to use just the album name regardless of if it's a original version or remastered.

I think the album title should be just the way the artist released it. Imagine having a hard copy CD, will you edit the title? 

The only time I change album title is when an album is released, and there is a single which is also included in the album, or a deluxe version is released, and some of, or all of the previous songs are included in the Deluxe. 

I take it further by making sure single(s) have their single album art, and every other one stays the same, then the Deluxe have their own. This way, I easily differentiate them when viewing. 

Bencherished. 

[andrewilley]

Where an Album has several variants that I want to differentiate, I tend to append the details to the 'Album' tag - so using "xxxx [Special Edition]" or "xxxx [Unplugged]". If the actual music content is exactly the same but it's a different encoding - perhaps a high-res FLAC version versus an original CD rip - I probably wouldn't waste the space with keeping both sets of files on my phone anyway, but if I did then I'd only differentiate them by filename or folder name, as for album listing purposes they are the same thing.

Andre

[andrewilley]

4 minutes ago, Bencherished said:

I take it further by making sure single(s) have their single album art

I never include an Album name for songs where I only have the single rather than a whole album, I just set the 'Album' tag to "(Single)". I have over a thousand such tracks in a similarly named folder. They still appear under the artist's name in Artist lists of course, but when using Albums view they all sit neatly in their own category at the start of the list (hence the use of brackets to force the item to the beginning) rather than just sitting in "Unknown Album" somewhere three-quarters of the way down the list.

Andre

[Bencherished]

@andrewilley

2 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I probably wouldn't waste the space with keeping both sets of files on my phone anyway,

I wonder why people do this? 

Bencherished. 

[Dijem]

51 minutes ago, 6b6561 said:

What is your current sort order?

For example one of my paths: 

Music - CD - Artists - Johnny L - [year][#cat] Album Artist – Album.

I don't have any problems with folder sorting, I only have some albums with same names wich become the same one, that's all. And the only way to fix this to use invisible symbols in album name.

[Dijem]

We have Catalog Number tag to separate same albums. Why don't Poweramp use it? 

[6b6561]

Convenience. I'm hauling around both a iPhone and Androids, iPhone doesn't deal with .flac...  so the easiest is to sync the full mp3 library to all devices, and add some albums as flacs to the Androids that I want to have uncompressed. The 60 flac albums are burning 19GB out of a 256GB card so space is not an issue.

[Bencherished]

3 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I never include an Album name for songs where I only have the single rather than a whole album, I just set the 'Album' tag to "(Single)". I have over a thousand such tracks in a similarly named folder.

Andre

Won't you like to know that the song is included in an album? 

Using Single is not bad, but for me, it helps me organise the album library, it also helps me to avoid having duplicates. In some case, I'll have a single, but because it was not having the album title, I end up downloading it again when downloading the album. 

Bencherished 

[andrewilley]

2 minutes ago, Bencherished said:

I wonder why people do this? 

I have a couple of identical albums in different versions for testing purposes, but for general listening I'd only ever want to use the highest quality one. Only exception would be if the song content was different, but then I'd modify the Album tag to indicate that.

Also I can't see the point of ripping an analogue vinyl record (which has probably been processed in the studio via digital mixing methods anyway) to digital files on domestic equipment. Just let the studio engineers (with millions of dollars worth of dedicated technology) do it for you. I can't see any reason why Master>Vinyl>Home-Ripped-File would be any better than Master>Digital-File, other than introducing an extra layer of surface noise from the turntable/stylus.

Andre

[andrewilley]

1 minute ago, Bencherished said:

Won't you like to know that the song is included in an album? 

No. Unless I have the rest of the album it's completely irrelevant to me that the song might also be part of an album - as far as my own library is concerned, it's just a Single.

Indeed, any given single might be available on multiple albums anyway, perhaps a studio album by the group, a "best of" release, other collections, film soundtracks, etc. Or maybe even not at all - e.g. ABBA's "Fernando", "Summer Night City", "The Day Before You Came", and several other songs were only released as singles, they were not on any of the band's original studio albums (although they have appeared on "Gold" and other collections in the meantime).  

Andre

[andrewilley]

13 minutes ago, Dijem said:

We have Catalog Number tag to separate same albums. Why don't Poweramp use it? 

Because we already have the Album name and the Artist's name. Catalog numbers are a pretty meaningless piece of commercial data anyway, as different releases of the same thing (maybe by a new company, or new format) will have different numbers.

Hang on a moment, I think I'm just going to have a listen to CCD1192 *

Andre

* which is the catalog number of my original 1980s CD of Blondie's "Parallel Lines" by the way, although according to Discogs that album has had 305 different catalog numbers over the years. Should they all really be treated as different albums?

[Dijem]

14 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Should they all really be treated as different albums?

I don't collect albums with same content.

I told already.There are two albums: Vinyl version and CD version. Track list is different, but all other information is the same.

If they were identical I wouldn't keep them

[andrewilley]

@Dijem If the contained tracks are very different, I would refer to them as different albums - or at the very least as different versions of the same album. For example, I have several 1980s Ultravox albums which were reissued in 2008/2009 as "Definitive Edition" 2-CD sets with extra and demo tracks, contemporary live recordings, other bonus material, etc. I thus set the Album title tag for the "Vienna" album as "Vienna [2008 Definitive Edition]". I did not retain any of the non-definitive versions as all of the original tracks were present on the first CDs, just with a lot of additional material on the second CDs.

However if there were different tracks present on one version of an album and not on another, I would probably set the Album title to the original name and have all of the originally released tracks in their correct order at the start, and then add the variations which only existed on a different release creating extra Track numbers with "[Bonus Track]" appended to the song titles. For example, I think it was Adele's albums that had different extras on different releases, so I just numbered the original 'core' tracks as numbers 1-11, and then added tracks numbered 12-18 from the various additional releases to the end, with the Track Titles annotated as "xxxx [Bonus Track]" and "xxxx [Live Acoustic]", etc.

The other situation that I sometimes come across is where an artist releases a mid-career Greatest Hits collection, but sneakily throws in a couple of new tracks as an incentive for fans to re-buy all the old stuff again. For example with Ultravox again, they released "The Collection" which included Track #5 as the single-version of "Vienna" and Track 13 as a song called "Love's Great Adventure" which has not appeared on any of their other studio albums. In this case, I broke my own rule of using "(Singles)", and instead set the Album tag for both songs to "The Collection". This does now mean that I have one extra Ultravox album with just two songs on it, which I would normally try to avoid to declutter the Albums list, but it seemed the correct way to handle these two songs and still keep them in the Ultravox listing as far as albums are concerned.

But there isn't really a one-size-fits-all method, I'm sure there are as many solutions to these sort of oddities as there are music collections. All you need to remember is that from a music player point of view, all songs which have the same Album tag and also the same Album Artist tag, will get grouped together into one album entity for playback, whatever you decide to actually call it.

Andre