I've used amarok for years and never seen this bug until the last month or two.

A number of my albums that were previously marked various artists (the Album Artist field was empty) have somehow had their tags changed. Now, each individual track has "Album artist" filled in with the data from "Artist", so that the album contents are scattered all over the place. Since I prefer to play entire albums, this is a big issue for me.

So, two questions:

(1) Any idea why this happened?

(2) What is the easiest way to fix it?

For (2), I have fixed a few by: filtering the local collection by album name, changing the album artist entry to a random string for the whole album and then changing it to blank for the whole album. This is a painful fix, because I'm talking about dozens of albums. Is there some way to do this using the local amarok database? I don't know offhand how to log into amarok's native database, so I may need some handholding for this.

Even getting a list of which albums were screwed up in this manner is a pain in the ****. I have about 1200 artists, and figuring out which ones appeared in compilations would take some effort.

Much thanks.

What did you change? We haven't changed anything recently, so there must have been something on your system that triggered this, either a tag editing, or a database update caused by a database change.
I use the same database since years, haven't seen that happen here. Also: are you sure it is a change that happened in the tagging or is it just a resorting in the display? I presume you talk about the collection browser view, not about the playlist view, where also sorting or a change in the playlist layout can cause changes of the way tracks are displayed.
So either you have used some tagging software or the tracks were tagged on a player, but Amarok is certainly not to blame as nothing can cause an accidental change in the tags software-wise without user interaction.

FWIW: it would be nice if you could always also state your version and distribution when you ask questions on the forum.

Mamarok wrote:What did you change? We haven't changed anything recently, so there must have been something on your system that triggered this, either a tag editing, or a database update caused by a database change.

I have made no change to my knowledge. This puzzles me.

I use the same database since years, haven't seen that happen here. Also: are you sure it is a change that happened in the tagging or is it just a resorting in the display? I presume you talk about the collection browser view, not about the playlist view, where also sorting or a change in the playlist layout can cause changes of the way tracks are displayed.

I'm looking at the tags as shown in "Edit Track Details" to confirm that the "Album Artist" is mis-set.

I use abcde to rip CDs, and have done so for years. It uses id3v2, I believe, to tag the file, and does not set "Album Artist". I don't know how amarok chooses that tag.

So either you have used some tagging software or the tracks were tagged on a player, but Amarok is certainly not to blame as nothing can cause an accidental change in the tags software-wise without user interaction.

FWIW: it would be nice if you could always also state your version and distribution when you ask questions on the forum.

Sorry for that omission. I'm using Ubuntu xenial, and

Qt: 4.8.6
KDE Development Platform: 4.14.13
Amarok: 2.8.0

Your answer has me puzzled, I must say. If nothing has changed in amarok, then I can't figger out how this has happened.

Any suggestions on how to fix it? Thanks.

I don't know how you have organised your music physically, if the albums are in the same location, you should be able to re-add the tag simply by editing the album with a mass-tagger. I for instance have the compilations in a different folder than the one-artist albums, so editing this particular folder content with for example kid3 shouldn't be difficult.

As a rule: the artist album tag is empty for compilations and various artists collections, it has the artist name for single-artist tracks or albums. SO if a track is part of a various artists compilations it should NOT have an entry in the album artist field.

If you choose to display the collection browser by album or by album artist will give different results, as it will if you sort it by artist. The default since about 4 years is sorting by album artist. Maybe it is just the display sorting that is wrong?

Mamarok wrote:I don't know how you have organised your music physically, if the albums are in the same location, you should be able to re-add the tag simply by editing the album with a mass-tagger. I for instance have the compilations in a different folder than the one-artist albums, so editing this particular folder content with for example kid3 shouldn't be difficult.

As a rule: the artist album tag is empty for compilations and various artists collections, it has the artist name for single-artist tracks or albums. SO if a track is part of a various artists compilations it should NOT have an entry in the album artist field.

If you choose to display the collection browser by album or by album artist will give different results, as it will if you sort it by artist. The default since about 4 years is sorting by album artist. Maybe it is just the display sorting that is wrong?

Thanks. It seems that I couldn't figure out how to do that using id3v2, but no matter.

It seems to have been a smaller number of affected records than I feared. I found that it all happened on the same date, so got a collection of names of the records (about ten or so) and fixed it in KDE.

Still puzzled how it happened, but the fix wasn't so onerous as I thought. Maybe I have to look into kid3 some time.

Thanks again.

Good, nice to hear it is fixed. Kid3 is a very nice tool as it also has the ability to show older ID3 tag versions (as used by some MP3 players, even now) and can help with some tag discrepancies that show up if there are older tag versions already in a file. I had some tracks from Spotify a while ago with terrible tagging that was all done in ID3v1...

Mamarok wrote:Good, nice to hear it is fixed. Kid3 is a very nice tool as it also has the ability to show older ID3 tag versions (as used by some MP3 players, even now) and can help with some tag discrepancies that show up if there are older tag versions already in a file. I had some tracks from Spotify a while ago with terrible tagging that was all done in ID3v1...

I spoke too soon! This is a puzzling issue.

I have many albums of various artists. I noticed that a handful of them were listed with "Album Artist" set to "Artist" for each song, obviously screwing everything up. I changed "Album Artist" to blank for each of these albums and all was well.

Until I rescanned the local collection. After this, the same albums ended up screwed up in the same way. As far as I can tell, it's just these same albums (I might be overlooking differences, it's not so easy to check with confidence).

I tried using kid3 to add a blank "Album Artist" tag to each song. No change, even after a full rescan. I'm guessing (and this is only a guess) that Amarok has already set the Album Artist in its database and is not re-reading it from the id3v2 tag.

The fact that this is only happening to a handful of albums is very puzzling. I cannot find any common feature. I thought it was happening only to recently added discs, but then I realized that one of the albums has been in the database for years.

Any advice would be appreciated, again. Thanks.

I am a bit at loss here, as this behavior seems very unusual. What I suggest you check is whether all the physical locations for those tracks are writeable, and maybe those tracks are present in more than one location (e.g. in an artist album, and in a compilation), which might explain the differences.

Hello, Mamarok.

The files are writeable, but the id3v2 tags do not include Album Artist, far as I can tell. I was supposing that amarok is storing this information in the database without altering the mp3 files. Does this not sound plausible?

Thanks.

Interesting. I will have to dive in the code to check if that is indeed the intended behavior. But it still doesn't explain why you would suddenly have a different behavior in your collection, as we didn't change anything on our side.