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Post by Siomon on Dec 10, 2011 20:10:17 GMT -5
First, many thanks for a fantastic app, the first one I have tried that I would call truly gapless playback, it certainly coped with something I was trying to play. The Album list view seems to be Album/artist. If I have an album with multiple artists I would like the option of being able to group by album only. At the moment I am seeing multiple albums for the same CD where there is more than one artist. Many thanks
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Post by GoneMAD on Dec 10, 2011 21:11:39 GMT -5
hey
are you talking about the album list for a specific artist or the album view that shows every album on the device?
an album should only show once if your files are tagged correctly.. even if there are various artists
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Post by Simon Robbins on Dec 11, 2011 5:48:41 GMT -5
I'm talking about the list which shows every album on the device, I think. It's the one I see when I press on the disc icon in the navigation bar. Where I have an album with more than one artist it appears as two or more albums, with the name of the appropriate artist underneath. Pressing on any one of them just gives a list of that artist's tracks on that particular album. Maybe I have something wrong with my tags, but before I decided to purchase this app I did look at Real Player briefly and that listed all albums once regardless of artist so I am assuming it is not a tagging issue.
cheers
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Post by GoneMAD on Dec 11, 2011 12:05:17 GMT -5
are the files in the same folder?
files in separate folders are assigned different albums even if the tags say they are from the same album (since 2 different artists can have the same album name)
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Post by Simon Robbins on Dec 11, 2011 14:45:34 GMT -5
Ah, that will be the answer. No they are not in the same folder. A separate folder has been created for each artist. Not my choice, something which DoubleTwist decided for itself which is what I used to sync some stuff from iTunes on my Mac to my phone.
I will have to work out how to stop it doing this or find something else to sync the two. I notice that on the Mac, iTunes creates a folder for each Album artist but on the phone this has been changed to a folder for each artist, so where I have files tagged "various" for album artists but specific names for each file's artist, what started off in one folder has been split up by DoubleTwist.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, now I just need to find a solution. I would say again though that RealPlayer sorts them as I would expect. Could an option be added easily to group by album artist instead of artist?
cheers
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Post by GoneMAD on Dec 11, 2011 14:57:57 GMT -5
I'll see if i can think of a way to get it to group them better with your setup
There is really no good way to cover both cases. What happens in real player if you have 2 albums with the same name and same year.. but are actually by 2 completely different artists (or are 2 different various artists albums)?
By the way you described real player working.. it would group both of those albums together into one selection, which would be really bad
edit: also many people do not use the album artist tag, which is why I assume songs with the same album name in the same folder are part of the same albm
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Post by Simon Robbins on Dec 11, 2011 16:31:31 GMT -5
I thought I would test it but Double twist seemed to get a bit confused and didn't update properly in line with iTunes. Certainly iTunes grouped two albums together if they had the same name/year and I expect Real player would have done the same if I had got the sync to work properly. I agree this is bad, however realistically what are the chances of having two albums by different artists in the same year with the same name? If they were famous bands the one who thought of the name first would probably sue the other over copyright.
I listen to a fair amount of classical music so say I have an album with an orchestra playing 3 concertos. I use the name of the orchestra as the Album artist as they are on all tracks but the 3 soloists are listed as the artists and they obviously vary.
It would be nice to have the option of grouping albums by album artist rather than artist. People who don't use the album artist tag simply wouldn't select that option.
cheers
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Post by GoneMAD on Dec 11, 2011 20:39:14 GMT -5
i'll definitely look into it. As you can tell by looking through the preferences.. i am a fan of making things as customizable as possible so if i can find a way to do it without redesigning everything.. i'll do it. I think I have an idea how to accomplish this, however it would be a scanner setting so you would have to run a rescan in order to change the setting back and forth.. which i wouldnt imagine would be a big issue.
As for the odds of the same album / artist name, yes the odds are slim but i've seen it happen with underground artists who release a lot of demos (demo doesnt have a name so the album just shows up as 'demo'). Unknown bands will use names already taken a lot of times.
What is probably more common is the same band releasing 2 demos in the same year. I have a few of those. Another situation would be artists that release cd singles or maxi singles. A lot of times there will be 3-4 different versions of a single (with different bonus tracks / remixes) but have the same album name.
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Post by Simon Robbins on Dec 12, 2011 2:36:17 GMT -5
Sure, it wouldn't be an issue to have it as a scanner setting. I would envisage that different users would make the decision based on the type of music they listen to and the way they use the tags. I don't think it would need to be changed often once the initial decision had been made.
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Post by Simon Robbins on Dec 26, 2011 20:38:03 GMT -5
I have been using the app for a bit longer now and noticed a few other things about the way the lists are organised.
First, further to my previous request I notice that the Album artist is scanned in already (presumably because I didn't check the "Ignore AlbumArtist tag" option in the scanner.) This is correctly shown under the album title in the main album list. It is also shown in the header of the track list when selecting a particular album. Each track in the track list correctly shows the artist for each track. As this data is presumably already scanned in, wouldn't it just need an option to group the main album list by album artist rather than a change to the scanner?
Also, possibly mainly with Classical music, there are some pieces which are too long for one CD and therefore come on two or more. Each of my tracks contains tags such as disk 1 of 2 but these are obviously ignored by GMMP. I know I could get round this by changing the album names to include disc 1, disc 2 etc. but then they would be listed as separate albums which isn't really true, and selecting the first track of disc 1 would only preload the other tracks from that disc into the current playlist not the whole piece of music. I suppose another solution would be to number the tracks consecutively regardless of disc, but many online systems do not do this automatically and instead number the tracks on each disc from 1 to whatever. This means that in the album view I am getting two track 1s followed by two track 2s etc which of course is not the right order. It would be nice if GMMP ordered tracks by disc number and then track number.
Thirdly, it seems the Composer tag is ignored completely. Even for other genres not all a band's music is written by the same person and one person may write for more than one band. It would be good to scan the composer tag as well and have an icon in the navigation bar to display by composer and the option to display the current tag in the Now Playing view.
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Post by GoneMAD on Dec 27, 2011 2:29:29 GMT -5
these are definitely good suggestions.. dont think i've ignored anything you've previously suggested.. everything is on my list.. december is just a busy month with the holidays and all, so i havent been able to work on gmmp as much as i'd like to
so are you saying if you use the "Ignore AlbumArtist tag" option.. everything is grouped how you wanted?
"Each of my tracks contains tags such as disk 1 of 2 but these are obviously ignored by GMMP"
which tag do you have that info stored into? I did make a note to myself a few months ago about handling multiple cd albums a bit better.. because like you i have a few albums that end up playing out of order because of that (i ended up manually changing the track numbers but definitely see the need to handle it better). One work around i had was to use the folder browser and just load the playlist file which was ordered correctly.. but everyone probably doesnt have that option
yea composer tag is ignored right now. i tried to start with the standard ones that every file type had. The album artist tag is the only one of the non standard tags i've addressed and even then some audio file types dont have a standard for it so it can be quite a pain (ALBUM ARTIST, Album Artist, albumartist, and ALBUMARTIST are all "valid" tag names in some of the filetypes)
i will definitely look into introducing support for some of the other tags.. one of the things i wanted to eventually do was have multiple artist support for songs and this would be a great case for that
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Post by Simon Robbins on Dec 27, 2011 5:58:37 GMT -5
No, I didn't mean everything is grouped as I wanted. I am making some assumptions here but in the Album library the album artists are shown beneath the name of the album both in the main list of albums and in the header of the track list which displays when I click on any album. Under each track name the artist is given. As I understand it GMMP gets this information from the scanned database not from the file itself. Maybe that is my lack of understanding. But if that is right then it seems the database already contains the album artist tags. Also if I long click on an album and go to the tag editor it shows the album artist. I assume that if I had checked the "ignore AlbumArtist tag" option in the scanner that information would not be there. If that is not the case then what is that option in the scanner for?
So, if the data is in the database, is it not just a case that an option is required in the "Album Library" preferences where you can chose sort order etc giving a new choice something like "Group by Album Artist instead of Artist".
For the disc 1 of 2 bit, sorry another assumption, I must stop doing that, what I should have said was iTunes enables me to add that information and I assume it must be held as a tag in the file. I have just gone and looked at Real Player again, which I haven't done for a while and that seems to handle the files correctly which would support my assumption, otherwise how would it know the correct order?
I hadn't realised Album artist and composer were not standard tags. I have limited experience in these things and assumed (there I go again) that if iTunes had it, everything else did as well.
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Post by GoneMAD on Dec 28, 2011 1:44:36 GMT -5
the "ignore albumartist" tag will not scan the album artist tag and only use the artist tag instead.... i guess some people have bad data in the albumartist tag.. i dunno it was a request that was easy to add so I did it
regardless which tag is used.. the grouping would still be bad... if i add an option to disable the assumption that a new folder = new album.. i think everything would be grouped together correctly
i was going to ask where in the tags the disc # was stored (i thought it was maybe in the comments field) but then looked up the id3v2 spec and saw there is a specific tag for disc number
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Post by Simon Robbins on Dec 28, 2011 14:33:12 GMT -5
I think you are probably right. Ignoring the assumption of new folder=new album would presumably just group everything by the album title (and date?) alone and would only be an issue if two had the same name/year which certainly for me is unlikely.
Glad you found the disc tag as I wouldn't really know how to find it. Hopefully that can be used to sort tracks better on multi disc albums.
I had never heard of id3v2 so I googled it. Not rally sure if I was looking at the right thing but it seemed to suggest that Composer is also a standard tag, although I'm sure there is software out there which doesn't support it. iTunes does, and love it or loathe it, that's a fairly popular choice for many.
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Post by GoneMAD on Dec 28, 2011 16:48:19 GMT -5
yea.. id3 was the originally tags for mp3.. had the basic info.. v2 was added a bit later which added all the extra things like album artist, album art, composer, disc # etc
what i was referring to before was the lack of standardization between different audio formats
anyway for the composer tag... im thinking of handling it similar to how I handle artist/albumartist. If you click the menu button in the artist view.. you can toggle between looking at the artists and album artists. Doing something similar with composer would probably work well
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