Various Artist album woes

[dabbler]

First, thanks for an awesome product, on the Pi with a DAC i finally have a audio streamer the family can easily and reliably use! Excellent.

I have one issue I cannot fix though regarding compilation albums.

I have the albums tagged with artist - song artist, album artist - Various. However when browsing Album view in volumio, what should appear as a single album is split into an album per track - very frustrating.

Does any one know how to ressolve this please?

My settings in my music are:

Compilation Metadata Fields: Various
Sort Artists By: albumartist

Many thanks for your help!

[ROLO]

If all tracks on your compilation albums have the ‘albumartist’ field set to ‘Various Artists’ it should work. This way each track can have its own ‘artist’, but the album is still recognised as one.

[dabbler]

Thats what i thought as well, here is a sample first a compilation album with tags:

And this is how its displayed in Volumio/Browse/Albums (each track a separate album)

[ROLO]

Check if ‘Various’ is listed under Settings - My Music - Compilation Metadata Fields

[color=grey]Sent from the mobile client - Forum Talker

[dabbler]

It sure is:

[dabbler]

Been playing with settings and tags all night, I still cannot get various artists albums to appear as a single album Surely this cant be just me??

[ROLO]

This is how the settings look for me (default list of Various Artists):

Sorry, I don’t have further ideas as to how to fix this.

[a5cent]

I’ve never seen this either, but if I was in your position I’d do two things:

• Enable extended file format support
• For compilation metadata fields, use “Various,various” rather than just “Various” (just to rule out this being a bug)

Then rescan your library and clear your browser cache.

Make a difference?

[liberator]

If you have ssh access can you first confirm that mpd is reading your tags correctly?

From the prompt type:

mpc find album “In The Mix 96” albumartist “Various”

If your tags are correct it should list each track with it’s path. If not, there is something wrong with your tags.

[dabbler]

Hmm nothing is returned at all from the mpc command.

[dabbler]

@a5cent

I’ve never seen this either, but if I was in your position I’d do two things:

• Enable extended file format support
• For compilation metadata fields, use “Various,various” rather than just “Various” (just to rule out this being a bug)

Then rescan your library and clear your browser cache.

Make a difference?

Thanks for the suggestion, unfortunately no difference at all

[liberator]

@dabbler

Hmm nothing is returned at all from the mpc command.

This means that mpd cannot find the album “In The Mix 96” with the albumartist set as “Various”. Not a Volumio issue.

To check which albumartist(s) mpd records for the album, from the prompt type mpc list albumartist album "In The Mix 96"

I am sure you will find you have multiple albumartists listed in the result.

I suggest you check and correct the tags using a program like mp3tag.

[dabbler]

Problem solved.

Even though all mu music had “album artist” tagged as “Various” in tag&rename, when i opened the same files in mp3tag - “album artist” wasnt populated. I populated it in mp3tag, rescanned and all is good

I will never user tag&rename again…

[Wheaty]

Thanks for this.

I’ve just FLAC’d all my albums since and had this problem as well. Quick trip though mp3tag has fixed most of mine as well…

Have spotted another minor (fixable) niggle…

I have Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, as well as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
also ah-ha is below everything else in the list (ZZ Top)

Got to love upper & lower case sensitivity!

Wheaty

[roko]

Hi, Volumio newbie here

None of the above (and what I found in other treads) worked for me. Almost drove me crazy.

But by chance i found that setting the tag PERFORMER to Various Artists (or the name of the main artist in collaboration albums) worked for me (Volumio 3.396) Now tese albums show as a single album in the album view.

So yeah… setting the Albumartist tag had no effect. Can anyone tell me why?

Still deciding if I should buy Volumio… I really like it but this costed me a few frustrating days to figure out and the documentation and forums didn’t help.

[MrPing]

Check the compilation fields, and the sort option. The options in that screenshot are default for the current version of Volumio that I installed recently.

I had this issue as well. Looked at my files, and I didn’t have anything other than the artist tag set for each track, and since Volumio is relying on that rather than the directory name (like I used to).

Setting albumartist=Various for all tracks of compilation albums fixed this for me. I used ‘metaflac’ for this. You should probably use whatever tagging method you’re already using.

Note that Volumio still has to pickup the changes, so you have to go into Sources and click ‘Update’.