Volumio 2 - Various Artists Albums not displaying correctly

More flexible configuration of tags in navigation and playback.

We all have different approaches and preferences on how we like to navigate our music collection.
I propose a more flexible set up of the options in both the navigation and playback screen.

For example:
*It would be very nice if it was possible to handle both albumartist and artist as separate tags in the gui (and also other tags like composer, performer).

  • There are a lot of compilation albums and it would be grate to be able to set albumartist as VA (Various artists) to avoid seeing multiple entries of the same album with a single artist in the navigation while still showing the artist during playback.
  • for some users there are other tags that matter like conductor (different recordings of same piece)

Why not make navigation tags i library/browse view configurable. Let the user select which tags he/she want’s listed based on how their own music database is tagged and organized.
Also make which tags are shown in the playback view configurable in a similar way. It could possibly be done conditionally so…
If tag genre=“classical” show “composer”, “conductor”,…

/Palle

Im really enjoying Volumio 2, however Im struggling to get the Album View to work correctly for any Various Artists albums

What Im seeing in album view are separate entries for each song, as if they are individual albums. I have checked the tags for the individual audio files in MediaMonkey and also MusicBrainz Picard and can see that the files all have the same album name and also are tagged under Album Artist as Various.

It would be helpful to have the ability in settings to control the way Volumio handles Compilations and audio file names.

has anyone else experienced the same problem with this and also more importantly has anyone got this working?

Brad

I have the same issue. This might be related to the albums being grouped by Artist instead of Album Artist. But makes album view unusable for me. The same goes for browse by Artists since this lists all artists with only compilation tracks as well (Showing more than 7K artists in my collection while I only have around 1000 regular album artists. (Which makes artist view unusable for me as well. If these 2 issues are related they can be both fixed by using Album Artist instead (and maybe show both search folders, for Artist and Album Artist)

Its good to know Im not alone. Its great to have the Album feature in Volumio 2, but only if its usable.

I have some Various Artist collectiosn which are tagged under Album Artist as Album name and they are also listed as individual albums for each track. The odd thing is that not every track gets listed either.

My benchmark for Volumio is what I used to get from the original Slim Devices Squeezebox User interface and search facility. In the set up of that device you could choose how it handled various artists and your file names.

That’s a great idea!
As of now we use this mpd command to retrieve the album names

list album group artist]

See here:
github.com/volumio/Volumio2/blo … x.js#L2414

We could use (if user wants)

list album group albumartist]

However that would be risky: if you don’t have meta for albumartist, no album shown…

What do you guys think?

sounds like it could work for me, although lots of my VA albums are tagged as Various, Various Artist and VA under Album Artist.

So, let me think…
We could filter out Various, Various Artist and VA from those results… Would that work?

PS: I added a reference in our github, if you don’t mind lets go on there so we don’t loose track of it…

github.com/volumio/Volumio2/issues/814

I’d suggest simply displaying by albumartist with no extra filtering. I generally like to see my ‘various artist’ albums when browsing by albumartist on other systems. If someone has them tagged in several different ways, surely they need to sort out their tags? :slight_smile:

michelangelo

Could you please have a look at the feature suggestions I made a couple of days ago…

https://volumio.org/forum/more-flexible-usage-different-tags-navigation-and-play-t4874.html

It’s bang on topic.

Instead of a fixed soultion making something like the tags configurable would b fantastic.
In addition there could maybe be something lika an advanced tag view, allowing users to see all tags for a tilte (currently I have no sugestion how that would be implemeted gui wise).

Note. I also made another one about an icon view in browse tab https://volumio.org/forum/icon-view-browse-tab-t4875.html

/Palle

Palle, yours seems the best idea (i placed your post on this thread to find it easily).
We can definetely make that… It will take time, but you’re going to see this in the future…

Yes Flexible configuration is the most complete solution (also when looking only specifically at the artist issue, because most of the time I like to see the album artists and not the artist, but sometimes I want to look at all tracks of a specific artist including the various artists albums. And this could possibly give the option to browse on other less commonly used tags (or even custom tags)

Additional questions/remarks on this:

  • Does this mean that you change album view to use the “album artist” (to consolidate various artists albums to a single entry)
  • Can you do some logic like if “album artist” empty use “artist” for tracks not having an album artist set (not an issue for me, but I don’t know if this is set by all taggers)
  • Does this mean you can then use the "Album Sort Title and "“Artist Sort Name” (makes browsing easier)
  • Would it be possible to have a quick jump letter list to quickly browse to the items (like MPod/MPad uses or iPhone Contact lists)

Hi

Hope work on improving this feature is progressing - the current behaviour displaying multiple entries for compilations is really clunky. The suggested fix to use album artist as the primary grouping would be far preferable, even though many taggers don’t provide it by default, it is easily added. Including an automatic fallback to use the track contributing artists would be nice to have.

Would prefer to get just the Album name displayed. Any way to achieve that?

I believe the default should be to group by album artist (If it is populated), and then by artist. Otherwise, this happens if people have filled in the ID tags properly.

This is an album of remixed, released by 65daysofstatic. The album artist is 65DOS (i.e. they released the album) but the artist has the original artists (and 65DOS on because they’ve messed with them. Instead of one album, you get 12 albums, one for each different artist.
65dosremix.PNG

Hm, I am no programmer, but why is grouping by artist necessary? Are there too many albums having the same name? I don’t know, but I don’t have…
Does anyone have a duplicate album name in his/her collection? Just thinking…

There are trivial ones like “Greatest Hits”. Other non-trivial ones (which sometimes give me a headache with Amarok):

A Night at the Opera - Queen
A Night at the Opera - Blind Guardian

Feels Like Home - Norah Jones
Feels Like Home - Sheryl Crow
(Wikipedia lists two others I don’t have)

I would like an option to have albums grouped by directory: If several files are in the same innermost directory, and they have the same album title, they are the same album, regardless of the artists (and they could be show as “Various” or whatever). Same as tagging the files with “album artist: Various”, but without the need to modify the files. Similarly, if two files are in different directories, they are different albums, even if the album titles are the same

An option for grouping by folder would be fantastic! I have lots of multiple editions/releases of the same album (with sometimes different mastering/versions of tracks and/or bonus tracks)

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hi,

It would be great if a solution could be found. I have started one of the topics discussing the same issue. In my opinion it is best to follow the ID3 standard if possible, therefore select the album artist. Nice to have would be that when there is no album artist, the artist tag is selected. That last option seemed to be implemented previously? library-and-album-artist-t1834.html

I’m not much of a fan of adding filters, rather use the available tags to seperate possible duplicate albums.

Almost always, Indian content is mostly songs for films. And there are a lot of singers & lots of tracks. So sorting by Artist will never work for us.
Every film has only one composer, so we tag songs with “COMPOSER”, “ALBUM ARTIST” & “ALBUMARTIST”. All these fields represent only the COMPOSER.

Refer to this tracklist from an album by name, “Athu Oru Kanakkaalam”, composed by, “Ilayaraja”:
Track Number. Title - Artist - Composer/AlbumArtist/Album Artist

  1. Andha Naal Nyabagam - Vijay Yesudas, Shreya Ghoshal - Ilayaraja
  2. Kaattu Vazhi - Ilayaraja - Ilayaraja
  3. Unnala Thookkam - Ranjith, Malathi - Ilayaraja
  4. Kili Thattu - Bhavatharini, Jothi - Ilayaraja
  5. Ennada Nenacha - Ranjith, Vijay Yesudas - Ilayaraja

Refer to this tracklist from an album by name, “Lagaan”, composed by, “A.R. Rahman”:
Track Number. Title - Artist - Composer/AlbumArtist/Album Artist

  1. Ghanan Ghanan - Lagaan - Udit Narayan, Alka Yagnik, Sukhwinder Singh, Shankar Mahadevan, Shaan, Kishori Gowarikar & Chorus - A.R. Rahman
  2. Mitwa - Lagaan - Alka Yagnik, Udit Narayan, Sukhwinder Singh & Srinivas - A.R. Rahman
  3. Radha Kaise Na Jale - Lagaan - Asha Bhosle, Udit Narayan, Vaishali & Chorus - A.R. Rahman
  4. O Rey Chhori - Lagaan - Alka Yagnik, Udit Narayan, Vasundhara Das - A.R. Rahman
  5. Chale Chalo - Lagaan - A.R. Rahman, Srinivas & Chorus - A.R. Rahman
  6. Waltz for a Romance - Lagaan - Instrumental - A.R. Rahman
  7. O Paalanhaare - Lagaan - Lata Mangeshkar, Udit Narayan & Chorus - A.R. Rahman
  8. Lagaan…Once upon a Time in India - Lagaan - Anuradha Sriram & Chorus - A.R. Rahman

    I would like the Albums to be listed as:
  • Athu Oru Kanakkaalam
    Ilayaraja
  • Lagaan
    A.R. Rahman

And not like this:
Volumio_Screenshot_002.png
That’s a lot of entries for a single album.

And I’m not sure how and from where, the second track has the “Composer’s Picture”. Reason maybe, since for this particular track, he’s the composer as well as singer… His name is there in artist tag and Volumio pulled a picture of it from the internet…

Instead, a better option would be… the list can use pictures tagged within the tracks as “Front Cover”, “Media”, “Back Cover”, “Artist” & “Icon” or if there are no pictures tagged into tracks, then Volumio can search for pictures from the same directory as the tracks and use them…

Also, if the track is tagged with more than one picture, or if the directory has more than one picture, clicking on the picture in Volumio’s UI should bring the next pictures. Or, Volumio can also auto cycle pictures every 1 minute or 30 seconds…

I agree with LinkeLoutje 's position - use the standard tag metadata. Adding a value for Album Artist to all the files for a given album is trivial for the user when organising the music library and is generally only required in the case of compilations. The user can decide what is put in the field to suit the content type. It is not a breaking change over what the methodology is now if the fallback to using the contributing artist tag is retained. This is better than using the “all files in the same folder means the same album” approach as the software need not force assumptions regarding how to attribute the material - i.e, displaying the Album Artist tag along with the album title is more meaningful than “Various”, and avoids a need for translating the hardcoded “Various” into multiple languages.