Library issues; Genre and Cover Art Errors and Duplicate Files

Volumio Information

Volumio Version:2.# (latest version)
Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3B
DAC:ALLO Boss

Hello,

Volumio is the absolute answer to my desire for having a music server in the house after years of trying to find one that served all my needs. It’s fantastic! However, my first install and operation of the latest version of Volumio failed due to a bad Micro-SD card. Had to flash a new drive and start all over. During the install, I installed the Raspberry Pi 7” touchscreen plugin as well as the plugins for Spotify and Pandora. All work great. However, with this second install (all my settings are exactly the same as the previous, which didn’t exhibit these issues), I’m seeing some genres showing up that are no longer present anywhere on the SSD drive that’s attached to the PI.

I used MP3TAG to go through each and every MP3 file in my 21,000 sound library. Each genre is correct; each artists is in its own folder with a single cover art image (cover.jpg); any other instance of a cover art file was deleted; each track is numbered accurately; any files that contain no data were deleted; duplicate tracks were deleted; I used Bliss to ensure that all the files were compliant. It took me two weeks, but after 15 years, I FINALLY have a complete and accurate library.

I’ve had the second install of Volumio scan the SSD drive multiple times. Each time, it finds genres that simply don’t exist anywhere in my library. It’s also loading duplicate files of songs in only a single genre (Chillout). I scanned the entire drive multiple times and there’s no duplicates anywhere. When it indexes the library for this one genre (Chillout), it pulls a single cover art image for every artist in “album” and “artist” view, but shows the correct album art when a track is playing… again, only in this one genre. The file where this single album art file doesn’t even exist anymore as I deleted the track and associated cover.jpg file associated with it, yet Volumio still continues to find and use it. It’s also finding entire albums (with multiple tracks) that don’t exist anywhere on the SSD. I know that sounds bizarre, but to give an example, my Volumio library under the “Jazz” genre, shows a list of files for an album of something like “Oscar Peterson Plays Montovani”, but that album doesn’t exist on the SSD. It DID at one time, but it was deleted and every trace of it wiped clean. Yet after a rescan of the drive, Volumio always puts it back under the Jazz genre.

I’ve tried fixing the problem by turning off “Web Album Art” and clearing the cache but that does nothing. I’m not having a problem with Volumio indexing a large library because every track on the SSD is there. I’ve cleared the album art cache multiple times, I’ve reset the library database and updated it as well. Nothing works to eliminate the duplicate files or showing genres that don’t exists anymore.

And yes… the duplicate files are both playable. I thought that perhaps one was a dead file that contained tag data, but no actual MP3 data… but that’s not the case. Something is telling Volumio to load the files in that genre twice.

Thanks so much for letting me rant a bit. Hope someone can help.

Aaron

Have you tried clearing the genre tag on the offending directory and re applying it?

I’ve noticed on MP3Tag, depending on genre character length, you can’t see multiple genre tags so you may have multiple genre’s without knowing it

No, but I’ll certainly try it. Unless I’m missing it, MP3TAG doesn’t have a search function, and that makes for spotting errors difficult. I’ll try renaming the offending genre where each and every track is showing up as a duplicate in Volumio and see what that does.

Thanks for the reply.

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Good luck and let us know how you get on

Here’s another question related to what I’m experiencing. I’ve actually searched for possible solutions to the issues I’m having and found “workarounds” and other items that may lead to an answer. However, the posts I’ve found in the forum are quite old and I’m not sure if anything was resolved in recent versions of Volumio. I understand that Volumio first goes looking for album art in the individual directories where each album (or track) is located. In my case, even if I have a hundred or so “singles” or “EPs”, each track is in its own directory with “cover.jpg” denoting the cover art. If a jpg isn’t found, Volumio will then turn to the web for finding album art.

I know in earlier versions Volumio didn’t support embedded album art, but has that changed with the newest version? The reason I’m asking is that a scan of my SSD I did overnight using Bliss found hundreds of “duplicate embedded artwork” in my MP3. Could that embedded artwork, or ANY other embedded information be throwing Volumio off when it comes to displaying the correct album in these troublesome genres. Could there be embedded info that’s causing Volumio to load duplicate tracks?

i’m trying to pull albumart from the local files but didn’t have any luck yet,
other images i can get but local seems to be a problem … youtube and radio files no problem
only with the local files i seem to have a problem…

I’ve actually had a bit of success. The offending genre seems to one I called “Chillout.” As I said earlier, Volumio scanned this genre’s tracks and all it’s accompanying artwork twice; duplicate tracks, and in the “Album” view, each artist listed had some off artwork file that wasn’t associated with the track at all. If I played either of the duplicate tracks, the correct artwork would show up as the track was being played.

I opened MP3TAG and renamed every single track in the “Chillout” genre to simply “Chill.” I double-checked for any duplicates or extra embedded artwork and found nothing. I started Volumio and had it do an update of the database. It found ALL of the tracks in the new Chill genre with all the correct artwork in Artist, Album, and Genre view; the duplicates were gone as well. HOWEVER, the old “Chillout” genre is STILL showing up with duplicate files.

Now I’m really confused because I scanned the living hell out of the SSD multiple times and there’s not a single trace of that genre anywhere on the drive; no duplicate tracks, no unwanted artwork. Somehow, Volumio has this old genre cached and I can’t get rid of it. I imagine now that some program editing is needed using SSH to get into Volumio’s DEV region, but I have no idea where or how to make this change if it is indeed the case at this point.

Aaron

if you have a spare card, burn another copy of volumio and see if that picks up rogue genre, but as you said I think it’s an artifact from the original scan and I have no idea where the database is saved

Did you rescan the storage or do an update, if the latter try a scan

Yes. This is the SECOND copy in a week that’s been installed. The first attempt installed great and exhibited nothing really strange other than missing artwork, etc. I fixed that by running Bliss against my SSD and made sure the drive was 100% compliant. But after operating for a while, I noticed that Volumio would become completely unresponsive… either at the Pi, or through my phone or tablet through a browser. It would also shut off the touchscreen and not bring it back up. Finally, it locked up completely and wouldn’t reboot. I traced THAT issue to a bad micro-SD card. Word to the wise… don’t cheap out on the SC card you use for the Volumio OS. Buy a good brand that’s rated for high-speed read/write… like one used for a camera. I also used a 64gb card rather than 32gb.

But as I said, the second install of Volulmio brought about these rogue genres and files. Other than that, it’s working GREAT!

I don’t use the genre’s so whilst having my first coffee of the day I checked mine, changed one I didn’t agree with and updated that folder, when I checked genres again that one had gone.

So it looks like update does reflect the changes and removes unused genres

Therefore it looks like you must have your random genres set on the tracks somehow, as to why you can’t see them with MP3tag, I have no idea

When you check your files in MP3tag, there’s a column labelled Tag which gives you the Tag version used on the file, what standard are the random genre tags? maybe the problem lies there?

Finally got around to trying some experiments. As I said before, the offending genre was called “Chillout.” I took all 196 files in that genre, renamed them to “Chill” and had Volumio rescan the SSD and update the database. The new genre was there with all 196 tracks, but the OLD genre (Chillout) was also there, but this time, the duplicate tracks in that genre were gone.

I took another 20 or so tracks from the Rock genre and changed it to “Test.” Volumio rescanned and found the tracks and put them into the new genre; they weren’t duplicated in the old “Rock” genre.

I looked at each of the 196 Chill files individually using WinAmp, MP3TAG, and Bliss. There is not a trace of the genre name of “Chillout” to be found anywhere yet Volumio continues to insist the tracks on the SSD.

I went drastic and completely deleted every track in the “Chill” genre. Volumio removed them on a rescan, but the “Chillout” genre still refused to go away.

Which brings me up to another question. Every time I make a change to the SSD… whether it’s by loading a bunch of new tracks, or simply making a name change here and there, should I have Volumio do a complete rescan of the drive or simply update the database? How important is it to have “web artwork” turned on if every single track in my 21,000 song library has either cover art in the same directory as the track, or embedded art in each file?

I really can’t understand why your copy of volumio behaves so different to mine (I’m running a RASPi2 with DAC Hat, 0.96" OLED & Vloumio 2.806)

I normally update rather than rescan and that seems to work fine for me
removed genres disappear once no longer used
I don’t have webart on, I have the cover art in the directory
I don’t have any embedded covers - that seems like a waste of disc space to me and bandwidth on the network

It’s also a pity we can’t seem to get anyone else to lend their expertise on this subject

I believe I finally found the answer to the problem, but I had to install Moode Audio in order to do it.

I went through the exact same configuration in Moode that I did for Volumio, and once the installation and scan of the SSD finished, I found I had the EXACT SAME issues; two genres that didn’t exist, duplicate files, missing artwork, and album artwork displaying for artists that had no accompanying cover art file.

I got “drastic” and completely deleted the “Chill” directory from the SSD then did a rescan of the library in Moode. There was no physical trace of the files anywhere on the drive, yet Moode was doing the exact same thing that Volumio was doing; finding a genre that was deleted, finding duplicate files, and it STILL detected files in the Chill genre I had completely removed from the SSD. I was even able to play files I thought I had deleted!

Or had I?

While trying to see if there were any stray album art files that could be causing problems, Bliss kept saying there were inconsistent genre tags and duplicate art files both embedded and in directories. When I went to check on this, I didn’t see anything wrong. And that’s when the light went off. Could the files be HIDDEN?! Sure enough, they were. Not only that, once I made all hidden files and folders visible, I found at the very top of the root directory on the SSD a hidden directory called “Recycle Bin.” In it, were 8,000 files that had been “deleted”, but not deleted! Both Moode and Volumio were adding that hidden directory (with all its assets) to their databases.

Once I wiped that directory out and did a rescan, everything worked and LOOKED perfect. So if you’re having artwork or tag issues, make sure you don’t have that Recycle Bin hidden folder on your drive causing all the headaches!

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Have to admit, don’t think I’d ever had resolved that, I’d probably reformatted the SSD and cured it by accident

@volumio so if they want to repair this problem exclude the Recycle Bin from the scanning files
maybe they will add it in the next releases…

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Think it’s a MPD thing rather than volumio as Moode did it as well

scan’s can exclude parts i think but i think it’s now more like a wildcard scan without a exclude

Regardless, every time I do any kind of file deletion on the SSD when I’m making corrections in Windows, a hidden “recycle bin” folder is created with items in it. I have to remember to go in and delete that folder or else Volumio will find it when I reconnect the drive to my Pi. I agree… an “exclude” would be a great thing to have.

No es necesario si tu unidad de almacenamiento esta formateada como NTFS si lo tienes como FAT32 tendrás el problema de la papelera de reciclaje

Interesting. I have been having the same problem of duplicate files show up even though I have checked and double checked and couldn’t find the files.

I will have to check my drive to see if there are hidden files and hidden wastebin.

I did have to I hide the MacBook .DS_Store files to delete them but never thought to check for hidden music files.