Albums get split in grid view

[montchenot]

Albums get split in grid view when a song genre has different values, some values with non ascii characters (other tags may also have such chars, or not) and these songs are assigned a rating value.

Doesn't always happen but, when it does, the above conditions are true. Although I guess neither genre nor rating are involved in gathering an album.

I've read the "Issue with non ISO-8859-1 characters" report. I've done my best to tag with Unicode and have set a <script> tag with value "Unicode" in id3v2.3 with foobar2000 (<album artist> choice) — damn the id3 standard mess.

Anyway, I believe all values are read, and some albums with "special" characters and different genres are shown correctly. I have not yet identified the bug.

[MotleyGord]

Aug 2, 2022 8:44:51 GMT -5 montchenot said:

Albums get split in grid view when a song genre has different values, some values with non ascii characters (other tags may also have such chars, or not) and these songs are assigned a rating value.

Doesn't always happen but, when it does, the above conditions are true. Although I guess neither genre nor rating are involved in gathering an album.

I've read the "Issue with non ISO-8859-1 characters" report. I've done my best to tag with Unicode and have set a <script> tag with value "Unicode" in id3v2.3 with foobar2000 (<album artist> choice) — damn the id3 standard mess.

Anyway, I believe all values are read, and some albums with "special" characters and different genres are shown correctly. I have not yet identified the bug.

I have several compilation albums with tracks that use various genres. This is common with soundtracks especially. I don't see any albums splitting, are you at the current 3.3.9 version? There was a recent fix for some other causes for album splitting.

[GoneMAD]

genre is not used at all in album grouping, you have some other issue with your tags. Only tags considered are albumartist, artist, album, and year. The folder the files are in are also used to help with grouping

assuming you updated to 3.3.9 which had a fix for album splits in multiple folders, this link describes how gmmp groups gonemadmusicplayer.blogspot.com/p/dealing-with-split-albums.html

[montchenot]

I'm using <album artist> in the TPE2 frame, not <albumartist>, not <band>. As in foobar2000

It's working in more than 5K albums but some tens, in GMMP.

Could it be the rating in the database?

[GoneMAD]

no, rating is not factored into grouping.

for mp3, gmmp's tag reader does give priority to TXXX albumartist tag over TPE2 if it is present. I dont know how that translates to how foobar2000 labels them


Are you rating these files that end up getting split using GMMP? or were they rated outside. Writing the rating to the tags will rewrite the entire set of tags (even tho that shouldnt change any of the values.. it might up grade the id3v2 standard if an older standard was being used)

[montchenot]

I'm setting the rating through GMMP's interface.

I've checked again the files in the mobile and I'm seeing that some have been changed from id3v2.3 to v2.4 (like Windows does with files in the Music system folder, no matter how many times you tell it no to do so) - don't know which app did this in Android, maybe Spotify.

Anyway, I can share the files of two cases that are rendered split and bound together by GMMP, both cases with the same id3 differences.

[GoneMAD]

the spec change might be causing the issue. Feel free to email in 2 files that end up split

edit: i THINK gmmp writes out to id3v2.3 since the 2.4 spec was never made official

[GoneMAD]

the files you sent me look to group fine. I copied the folder in the zip as is over to my device

imgur.com/a/Ke50rGm

[montchenot]

Thanks for checking!

I had first updated some of the tags with GMMP but, when I saw there were differences with the FB2K tags, I took the SD card away to copy again those files from the desktop and meanwhile reset the library by cleaning and erasing it. Then, some other app might have messed with the tags. I will remove some of those (although I was having fun by comparing the different "random" results in each app).

Thanks!

[montchenot]

BTW, I rated some different files with Poweramp, BlackPlayer and GoneMAD. GM changed the tags to v2.4 by updating the Popularimeter value

[MotleyGord]

Aug 3, 2022 12:38:06 GMT -5 GoneMAD said:

the spec change might be causing the issue. Feel free to email in 2 files that end up split

edit: i THINK gmmp writes out to id3v2.3 since the 2.4 spec was never made official

Were you able to verify this? Seems that montchenot found tags were being changed from v2.3 to v2.4 when writing back changes to the ratings tag. This doesn't affect me, as I never sync anything from my phone back to my home library - I am too concerned about file corruption from mobile devices. But this could be a problem if a user syncs back any library changes to their main library and has other players that don't like v2.4, especially those that are looking to maintain their ratings changes in cases like this.

Maybe if need be you could add a switch in the library menu for GMMP to use ID3v2.3 (default) or ID3v2.4 when writing any tag edits?

[GoneMAD]

no plans on making the version optional. its been 11 years now and not a single person has complained that 2.4 has messed up something

I dont know why his albums were split, but the files he sent me were a mix of 2.3 and 2.4 and grouped together for me

[montchenot]

Yes, a single person.
Nobody but one :-)

Universe of apps is huge, data does not belong to an app. Modifying data without notice is like goingArrogant

v2.3 also accepts POPM (Popularimeter)

Regards,
Me

[GoneMAD]

gmmp does not modify data without notice. Saving tags is user initiated (when rating a file, that is the user using GMMP to write to the tags). Tags have to be written entirely when something is changed. You cant just modify a few bytes here and there

edit: to be clear im have not modified the default behavior of taglib. It writing.. apparently to id3v2.4 by default is a decision the taglib devs made github.com/taglib/taglib