Added album artists without songs affiliated to it

[steve1977 67]

As part of adding my music library, one bug surfaced.

 

At least two album artists have been added that are not associated with any albums:

 

[classical music]

[soundtrack]

 

Both show under the display of "albumartist". When clicking each of these two album artists, it opens the window where typically albums and songs are being dispayed. For these two, nothing shows. up.

All my songs have perfect MBZ tags and none of thes have these artists or albumartists.

 

Any idea why these two "albumartists" show up and why no album or song is associated to them? Thanks in advance!!!

[steve1977 67]

Any thoughts? Any idea how I can troubleshoot this further?

[ginjaninja 533]

if these two entries show up in your album artist view then its 99.99% certain that either

you have a track where the albumartst tag has these values...

or

you have a track where the album artist tag is resolved to these values by MBZ search.

 

when you edit the spurious album artist object does it have any ids/properties associated to it that shed light..

 

I know you say you have checked but I would say check again...

look for for tracks with multiple id3 tags versions.....extended tags like albumartist as well as 'album artist'.

 

use mp3tag to search for the values accross all tracks and all (extended) tags.

 

remove content from the library and rescan until you find out what track is causing it....if its not obvious once the track is identified...run ffprobe against it..to see what mb3 sees.

[steve1977 67]

if these two entries show up in your album artist view then its 99.99% certain that either

you have a track where the albumartst tag has these values...

or

you have a track where the album artist tag is resolved to these values by MBZ search.

 

I am sure your second suspicion is right. I have no clue, which song it is. All my songs should be perfectly tagged, but you never know. I have no clue how to find out, which one is the song that is resolved to these weird artists... 

 

when you edit the spurious album artist object does it have any ids/properties associated to it that shed light..

 

I know you say you have checked but I would say check again...

look for for tracks with multiple id3 tags versions.....extended tags like albumartist as well as 'album artist'.

 

use mp3tag to search for the values accross all tracks and all (extended) tags.

 

remove content from the library and rescan until you find out what track is causing it....if its not obvious once the track is identified...run ffprobe against it..to see what mb3 sees.

There are too many to try this. Is there no way to turn this around and identify the corresponding track through MBS? Also, given there is not a single album or track affiliated with this artist, how can this even be?

[ginjaninja 533]

looking at the the attributes of the album artists in question in mb3 is not onerous..theres only two spurious entries...so i would give that a go...

 

I am hoping the issue of content which precipitated a library object not showing under said library object, is able to be addressed in time...its quite fundamental to useability i agree.

[steve1977 67]

Thanks, I have spotted the albums, which has issues. Not sure whether there is an easy fix. Let me share what I think happens as well as the album NFO file created by MBS. Hope to get your thoughts how this can be solved.

 

<album>

  <review />

  <outline />

  <lockdata>false</lockdata>

  <dateadded>2014-11-22 02:04:16</dateadded>

  <title>Clarinet Quintets</title>

  <originaltitle>Clarinet Quintets</originaltitle>

  <year>1988</year>

  <premiered>1988-05-02</premiered>

  <releasedate>1988-05-02</releasedate>

  <genre>Classical</genre>

  <art>

    <poster>\\my-ip\user\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Compilations\Clarinet Quintets\folder.jpg</poster>

  </art>

  <artist>Carl Maria von Weber</artist>

  <artist>Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart</artist>

  <albumartist>Classical Music</albumartist>

  <track>

    <position>1</position>

    <title>Clarinet Quintet in A K.581: I. Allegro</title>

    <duration>08:53</duration>

  </track>

[... other tracks ...]

 

All of above is properly taken from my mp3 tags, which is great!!!

 

What works well and how it should:

 

1) Album view: works!!! album shows up and also nicely shows "Classical Music" (NOT "[classical music]") as artist

2) Artist view. works!!! "Carl Maria von Weber" shoiws and a click show this album listed

3) Album artist view: does not work! "[classical music]" instead of "Classical music" shows up and click leads to an empty field

 

So, there must be some form of bug here. Any idea? If any developer has appetite to look into this, I could send the MP3?

Thanks in advance for looking into this!!!

[ginjaninja 533]

you may find that if you remove the mbzid from the clasiical music album artist object that the content appears.

 

this is perhaps a new issue....less about non identical content being aggregated by virtue of identical mbz seach result and subsequently not showing (as the original issue is) and more about those square brackets in the resultant MBZ search match

 

https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=Classical+Music&type=artist&method=indexed

[steve1977 67]

Thanks. I don't think that the issue has anything to do with the square brackets. The issue is twofold:

 

1) MBS searches on MBS althought an albumartist MBZ ID is present in the tag

 

2) MBS treats this unequal. It relies on the "tags" (both albumartist and albumartist MBZ ID) when displaying songs and albums, but it does rely on the search results in the albumartist view.

 

 

Suggestion solution could be not to search for albumartist name if an MBZ ID is present. What do you think?

[ginjaninja 533]

if you meant 1) MBS seaches on MBZ even though the albumartist MBZ ID is present in tag....

my understanding is that although Luke has expressed an interest previously in potentially using embedded mbzid tag (as eg. added by picard) this is not in current functionality. my understanding is that such a tag is currently ignored. (I wonder if ffprobe can even access this extended tag)....

 

not following point 2..please explain a bit slowe for me...

 

when i said

"you may find that if you remove the mbzid from the clasiical music album artist object that the content appears."

i was referring to removing the id from the album artist object in mbs (under which no content shows when you click on it)...not removing the id3tag from the source files....give it a go and see if it makes a difference...just for investigative purposes...you can always add it back in again......ie backup,...remove the the entry from mbs in metadata manager...save...rescan...check if difference...

[steve1977 67]

Thanks, I am not at my computer these days, so cannot try to remove the MBZID. I believe thought that you are right and the albums will then wrongly show under [classical music]. But of course, that's not intended.

 

Your answer points me to the main issue though. It is about the MBZ IDs being ignored. Help me understand what MBS is reading from the tags? MBZ artist ID? MBZ album ID? MBZ albumartist ID? Or none of this info? What is it searching for on MBZ?

 

There is some form of inconsistency how artist/album and albumartist view is treated. Let me make another attempt to expain:

 

1) Artist view / album view - everything is perfect as shown in the album.nfo shared above. The albumartist displayed when clicking the individual album is the same as in the MP3 tag and in the nfo file (i.e., "Classical Music"). This is great and how I would love it be.

 

2) Albumartist view - here, "Classical Music" does not show up, but instead "[classical music]". So, apparently it takes what is displayed in the albumartistview from some form of MBZ search. This is inconsistent with what is being displayed when clicking on an album (i.e., "Classical Music" from the albumartist tag versus "[classical music]" from the MBZ search

 

 

Does this explain it better what I mean? Any idea about this inconsistency? Any idea what the solution could be?

[ginjaninja 533]

"Help me understand what MBS is reading from the tags? MBZ artist ID? MBZ album ID? MBZ albumartist ID? Or none of this info?"

answer:none of this info....MBS is using the 'normal' artist tag to do a search on MBZ, and populated the MBZID field in MBS metadata manager...

 

i have also experienced the difference between..as viewed in artist/album ,,,,,compared with album artist view...

 

i think the album artist view is doing something overly clever about aggregating album artist objects and their content which MBS deems to the same, due to some relation to the MBZID returned via a search on album artist tag...

but this cleverness doesnt completely work yet and when it doesnt work you either end up with multiple objects of seemingly the same artist but only the subset of full content (same subset under both) ...or

 

in this new case you have identified....a single object with no content...im guessing that this is related to the square brackets in the search match/response from mbz (only because square brackets are treated specially by other parts of MBS)..hence the suggestion about removing the MBZID...ie removing all notion of a string with square brackets from this object....if removing the mbzid from the mbs albumartist library object  works it sort of lends weight to the suggestion it is the square brackets confusing the interface...

 

no ideas on solution..or even if the developers think there is something that needs fixing and with what sort of urgency...but this new issue with [classical music] might ensure a reappraisal is forthcoming...seems like a shortcoming to me...

 

a short term workaround might be to remove the mbzid as suggested....or change the album artist to something non controversial...like 'Various Artists'.

[steve1977 67]

Let me try to summarize what I believe the "bug" is:

 

1) Albumartist name in the album view is shown exactly how it is in the MP3 tag

 

2) Albumartist MBZ ID is in the album view is based on MBZ search

 

3) Albumartist view displays album artists based on the MBZ ID and not on the display albumartist name

 

 

I believe there could be two alternative rather simple soliutions:

 

1) In album view, display the albumartist that is the same as the one associated the MBZ ID (i.e., don't show the one from the MP3 tag)

 

2) Show albumartist view based on displayed albumartist and not based on MBZ ID album artist

 

 

Each of above options would lead to creating consistency. Of course, I have no idea how why this is on the priority list of @@Luke and others, but I believe it would be great to have consistency here. Given that movies work the same (i.e., TMDB ID matches movie name), I would hope that this would not be too difficult to implement.

Even better would be a solution reading MBZ IDs from the MP3 tags, but I can imagine that this would be a LOT more work for the developers to make happen.

 

Thanks in advance!!!