Album Artist view - worked once, then no more

[bkphil]

Nexus 5 Stock 4.4 KitKat

First of all, thanks for what looks to be a great player! Have been on PlayerPro for two years, and loved it, but the failure of Album Artist to work properly there (largely an Android fault, not the dev's per se) sent me searching a replacement.

Really impressed with GMMP so far - in addition to fixing the Album Artist thing, lots of really great sorting and organizing options. This app has essential functionality that my brain had not even known it needed.

But.... one hiccup:

When I first loaded the app, and scanned, the Artists section showed up perfectly, reflecting Album Artists. Hallelujah! But then I thought "hey, let me switch to 'regular' Artist view" - ok, lots of misc artists from my countless compilations showed up, as expected. So I switched back to Album Artist view...

... and most of the artists from the compilations remained. Some disappeared, but most did not. Lots of non-Album Artists shown.

Open/close GMMP - no change. Restart device - no change. Delete database and rescan - no change.

What did I do wrong?

[GoneMAD]

changing between artist/album art view basically just executes a slightly different query to the database when retrieving the list.. so toggling between the 2 would have not changed the actual content

I am going to guess that when you first viewed the album artist list.. the scanner had not finished. The artist view in the current version doesnt refresh as things are added to the database.. you would have to manually hit refresh, relaunch the app, or toggle between artist/albumartists. Most likely when you toggled back to album artist view.. the scan had finished and you have some files from compilations without the album artist tag populated

If there is no album artist tag present.. GMMP makes the assumption that the artist and album artist are the same.

What happens when you select one of these songs from a compilation that shouldnt be listed and view the tags? What shows as the album artist? If its the same as the artist tag then GMMP is working correctly.

I listen to a lot of drum and bass mixes which not only have multiple artists.. but some of the tracks feature other artists (Artist A featuring Artist B), so using the album art tag is a must for me.

Here are some screens i just took

Album artist mode

Artist mode

Tag editor on one of the files

[bkphil]

Well, this is embarrassing. Got ready to insist, no, no, my tags are good... but decided to double-check.

Turns out my media manager does some funny things with the Album Artist tag.
- If the Album Artist tag is empty, it populates the Album Artist column of any view with the Artist tag (but does not write anything); and
- If the iTunes Compilation tag is set, it populates the Album Artist column of any view with "Various Artists" (this was my own doing)

All good, but obviously it means that my tags aren't actually what I thought they are.

Some forced tag-writing has fixed much of the problem, but I have a ways to go to sort out my own mess.

For now, wanted to touch base to say mea culpa, and apologies for raising a false alarm. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

[GoneMAD]

no problem

[bkphil]

OK, so now I've cleaned up my act. Everything was my fault, and I cleaned it all up. Some forced tag writing on several dozen compilations cleared up everything. Except... one album (15 track compilation).

On my PC, Helium Music Manager, MusicBee and MP3Tag all correctly read the tags, and 'saw' that 'Various Artists' was set as the Album Artist.

But with these files copied to my Nexus 5, GMMP (and PlayerPro) only read 2 of 15 files correctly - the other 13 appeared to have no Album Artist set. Curiously, the Google Music Player was able to read all tags correctly.

Eventually I used Helium to write a new Album Artist value to the files, and that fixed it. Something about the tags did not please GMMP, and using MusicBee to rewrite the tags wasn't fixing that something.

I'd blame it on MusicBee, but since other tag readers were happy with the tags, there's got to be more to the story, and on some level GMMP was the odd man out.

If you're interested in investigating, I'll be happy to pass the original files to you for testing.

In the meantime, I'm a happy customer!

[GoneMAD]

GMMP and player pro use have their own tag readers (GMMP uses a modified version of taglib) and dont rely on the android scanner. The GMMP tag scanner is a bit more... "strict" i would say in the tagging standards, this done for speed. There are tons of bad taggers out there that do not follow the id3 standards. I've tried to handle corrupt tags as best as possible but there is only so much that can be done without interfering with the reading of proper tags or severely increasing the read time.

Most of the bad tags i've come across became corrupt due to multiple tag formats being in the same file or lyrics incorrectly being embedded into the file

But yea feel free to email any files that dont show up correctly to [e-mail]

Foobar2000 and mp3tag are the 2 I usually test with first.. if one of those cant read it correctly there is usually nothing i can do about it