Hello,

today I experienced a really strange behavior:

I have set Amarok to play random albums. Albums are sorted by artist, year, album.

Today Amarok started to play the album "Pictures At An Exhibition" by Isao Tomita. The tracks are named

01.Isao Tomita - Promenade_ Gnomes.ogg
02.Isao Tomita - Promenade_ The Old Castle.ogg
03.Isao Tomita - Promenade_ Tuileries.ogg
04.Isao Tomita - Bydlo.ogg
05.Isao Tomita - Promenade_ Ballet Of The Chicks In Their Shells.ogg
06.Isao Tomita - Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle.ogg
07.Isao Tomita - The Market Place At Limoges.ogg
08.Isao Tomita - Catacombs.ogg
09.Isao Tomita - Con Mortuis In Lingua Mortua.ogg
10.Isao Tomita - The Hut Of Baba Yaga.ogg
11.Isao Tomita - The Great Gate At Kiev.ogg

Amarok played the first title, then for some reason it switched to the 2nd track of this album: "Pictures At An Exhibition" by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Track titles:
01.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Promenade (Gnomus).ogg
02.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Gnome.ogg
03.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Promenade (Il vecchio castello).ogg
04.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Sage.ogg
05.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Old Castle.ogg
06.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Blues Variation.ogg
07.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Promenade (Limoges - the Market).ogg
08.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Hut of Baba Yaga (Part 1).ogg
09.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Curse of Baba Yaga.ogg
10.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Hut of Baba Yaga (Part 2).ogg
11.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Great Gates of Kiev.ogg
12.Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The End - Nutrocker.ogg

That's very creative, but I prefer to listen to one album at a time, even when both are interpretations of a classical masterpiece of music.

I have other albums from different artists with identical title (e.g. "Greatest Hits"), but never noticed this behavior before.

Any idea why Amarok switched from the first track of album 1 to the second track of album 2? Does Amarok prefer ELP over Isao Tomita?

I stopped the ELP version and continued with track 2 of Isao Tomita's version. Again, after playing track 2 it jumped back to the ELP version.

Why doesn't Amarok want me to listen to Isa Tomita's version?

I had to queue all songs of the album to be able to listen to it without Amarok switching back to the ELP version.

Oliver

Can you tell us more details, like which version of Amarok, in which distro and KDE version? How are you generating your playlist? Also, what other sorting or other manipulations do you have in your playlist setup?

valoriez wrote:Can you tell us more details, like which version of Amarok, in which distro and KDE version? How are you generating your playlist? Also, what other sorting or other manipulations do you have in your playlist setup?

The Amarok version is in the subject (2.4.1), my distro to the left in the profile (Gentoo x86), KDE version is 4.6.3.

The playlist is simply my complete collection (12,000+ titles), track progression is random albums, favor "not recently played".

The playlist was created by selecting "replace playlist" on "Local collection" (left column), which is sorted by "artist/year - album" (same as playlist).

Oliver

Why do you load all your collection in the playlist? Amarok is not supposed to be used like this as it slows down considerably.
You should use either Dynamic Playlist or APG to generate a playlist. Disclaimer: this will be subject of changes in Amarok 2.4.2 as the whole Dynamic Playlist/APG stack has been re-written.

Out of curiosity: What happens if you change the album title slightly for one of the two? Amarok might see this as one album as it has the same title.

Mamarok wrote:Why do you load all your collection in the playlist? Amarok is not supposed to be used like this as it slows down considerably.
You should use either Dynamic Playlist or APG to generate a playlist. Disclaimer: this will be subject of changes in Amarok 2.4.2 as the whole Dynamic Playlist/APG stack has been re-written.

Out of curiosity: What happens if you change the album title slightly for one of the two? Amarok might see this as one album as it has the same title.

I renamed the ELP album to "Pictures At An Exhibition by ELP", this solved the problem.

Think I should check all those "Greatest Hits" albums I have...

The reason why I have my whole collection in the playlist is that I'm currently working on rating all titles again (currently 73%, still 3000+ tracks to go) so that I than can create dynamic playlists of my favorite tracks based on the rating. I lost most of my ratings when I moved from Amarok 1.4 to 2.0 .

I'm not sure if it is possible to create dynamic playlists that play complete albums that contain at least one unrated track. I had problems with new albums that had never been played before. For some reason an older version of Amarok 2.x refused to select them, that's why I switched to the complete collection.

Oliver

Load both versions of "Pictures of an Exhibition" into a tagger and check album artist. It must be filled and the same as artist, else Amarok recognizes them as one album. These are hickups of the scanner.
I prefer the ELP version by the way. One of my all time fav albums.

m0nk

Dieter Schroeder wrote:Load both versions of "Pictures of an Exhibition" into a tagger and check album artist. It must be filled and the same as artist, else Amarok recognizes them as one album. These are hickups of the scanner.

I checked the tags using Kid3 and both albums have the correct entries for "Artist" and "Album artist".

Oliver

Dieter Schroeder wrote:Load both versions of "Pictures of an Exhibition" into a tagger and check album artist. It must be filled and the same as artist, else Amarok recognizes them as one album.

I don't think Amarok works correctly with regards to setting the Album Artist tag. I have albums that have multiple artists and even if I set an Album Artist, that tag is not respected.

The problem here is that since the two albums are named the same, Amarok thinks they are the same album. You should see this in both the source view and the context view - the combined album will have two first tracks, two second tracks etc.

Pretty much the only solution here is to rename the albums. I usually rename it as Artist1: Album and Artist2: Album, but your solution works just as well.

There have been quite some changes in the code since 2.4.1, you might want to try Amarok 2.4.2 beta 1

Mamarok wrote:There have been quite some changes in the code since 2.4.1, you might want to try Amarok 2.4.2 beta 1

Amarok 2.4.2 is currently not available in Gentoo repository, not even as unstable.

Amarok 2.4.2 beta release number is 2.4.1.90, check for that.

After checking the entries in an external tagger, recheck them in Amarok. Sometimes Amarok removes the album artist entry.

m0nk

Mamarok wrote:Amarok 2.4.2 beta release number is 2.4.1.90, check for that.

No 2.4.1.90 in Gentoo, I'm already using the latest version:

Code: Select all

[I] media-sound/amarok
     Available versions:  (4) 2.3.2-r1!t 2.4.0!t ~2.4.0.90!t (~)2.4.1!t
     Installed versions:  2.4.1(4)!t(06:51:03 31.05.2011)
     Homepage:            http://amarok.kde.org/
     Description:         Advanced audio player based on KDE framework.


Current stable version is still 2.4.0.

Oliver

Dieter Schroeder wrote:After checking the entries in an external tagger, recheck them in Amarok. Sometimes Amarok removes the album artist entry.

I checked them in kid3 and after that in Amarok, both show the same entries for "artist" and "album artist".

Oliver

Hi again,

tried to play a "Greatest Hits" album today. I have 5 of them in my collection and Amarok played tracks of all Greatest Hits albums, after each track it jumped to another album.

I added all tracks to a queue to force Amarok to just play one album.