Albums showing up under Various Artists rather than under the Artist's name

[Jeffery Small]

Someone asked about this back in 2017 and got no replies.

In the Library, I have a number of albums that are showing up listed under Various artists rather than being shown under the actual Artist heading where they  should properly appear.  This makes it difficult to impossible to predict where new music being added to the library will end up.

For example, I have two albums by one artist, Joshua Redman.  All songs in both albums have the identical Artist and Album Artist field entries:  Redman, Joshua

Both albums exist under the same directory location and a direct examination of the EXIF data for each set of songs show nothing different.

So why are these albums being improperly sorted to the Various artists section, and is there anything that can be done to override this and get them to appear under their proper alphabetical Artist section?

Thanks.

[Sam]

Hi.

Try removing the comma between the last name and first name because clementine might be treating it as two different artists. I have a lot of tracks under various artists that have different artist names separated by commas.

hope this helps.

[Jeffery Small]

I'd like to revisit this subject again and ask if any new insights are available as to why albums are being sorted to the "Various Artists" category rather than being placed under their respective Artist listings.

Sam's idea regarding the comma in the Artist name doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.  Almost all of my albums reside under directories with 'Last, First' names and have similar entries for Artist, Album Artist, and Composer fields and get displayed properly under the Artist "Last, First" name in the Clementine library.  Additionally, there is an album under the Various Artists category with the album title "Round Midnight" and the artist "Levitas Brothers" which has no comma.  There are albums that contain only a single song, so it isn't even a case of comparing differences between multiple songs.

I have done an exhaustive scan of the tags for all songs in the 12 albums that are showing up there and have found nothing that would seem to trigger a Various Artists identification.  One classical album has different values for the "Conductor" tag, while most albums don't have this field defined.  Some of the albums have the "Compilation" tag marked Yes while other are No.  In every album, all of the songs have identical "Artist" and "Album artist" tags.

Can someone working on the code examine what is sorting albums to the Various artists category.  Is it based upon internal tags or could something external related to directory or file names be responsible.  It certainly seems like a serious bug to me.

[Jonas Kvinge]

Hi

The compilation calculation is quite complicated.

Also there were a few bugs that I recently fixed, so if you are using 1.3.1 or an older commit you are probably affected by it. My latest fix was 4. January 2020, so make sure you use a revision later than that date. Development builds are available.
Two of the bugs were:

1. It matched by album title only, instead of directory and album, so if you had 2 different albums by 2 different artists with the same album title they were always placed in "Various Artists"
2. Songs were stuck in "Various artists" even after updating.

A song is placed in various artists if one of the song matches the following criteria, the songs being matches need to have the same album title and be in the same directory:

- One of the songs has the compilation tag set to 1 per directory and album title.
- There is more than one artist or album artist per directory and album title.

Check the following:

1. Check with 3rdparty software like KID3 if the "compilation" tag i set, it's not shown or editable with Clementine.

2. Check that the songs does not share the same directory and album title.

You can however easily override this behavior by right clicking on a album or song and clicking "Show in various artists" or "Don't show in various artists".

I don't know what comma in the artist has to do with anything, or why it was suggested. But I've seen a lot of incorrect answers to questions on this list.

Jonas Kvinge
https://github.com/jonaski

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clementine Music Player" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clementine-pla...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/clementine-player/c61be72e-86b2-45d1-9930-60f01cfe75d5%40googlegroups.com.

[mick howe]

I've been using Clementine for about 3 years under Manjaro (1.4rc2) and over that time I have found that is becoming more and more aggressive in hiding every song that I edit the filename or tags under Various Artists instead of filing it by Artist/Album. With an estimated 10,000 odd songs by about 1,000 artists this illogical behaviour is driving me up me crazy.  No, scrolling all the way back to the top of the library listing is NOT a practical solution for something that should be an opt-in "feature" if it exists at all.

[Garthhh]

Album Artist, or the way the file name is written are the cause in most cases

The meta data is off in some way, the Clementine tag editor is limited & won't adjust all the fields
Try a different tag editor, I use Easy TAG, there are others