How to deal with Compilations/Albums with multiple artists

[William Brennan]

Hello fellow beets users,

I have a concern that I've been running into lately and I can't seem to figure out the best way to handle it. For compilations with multiple artists, beets will usually come across one song from a particular artist first then proceed to warn me that I am missing the rest of the tracks in the compilation. I think I've handled this the best way by selecting all my compilations in iTunes and checking the metadata box that says "Part of a compilation — Yes".

My biggest issue is with an album that has multiple artists or songs that currently "feat." someone along with the original artist. beets will usually come across a series of songs from the album and tell me I am missing the rest of the tracks, however when I get to the track that was missing, it will tell me that I have already imported the album into my collection and give me the usual options for a duplicate (skip, as-is, both).

I was wondering what you all believed was the best way to go about handling this issue. Thanks.

[Adrian Sampson]

Hi there—do you have an example of an album that does this? I think seeing beets’ output copy/pasted would help us understand what might be going on.

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[William Brennan]

Yes I will post an example of this when I get a moment free at work!

[Adrian Sampson]

This is very strange behavior indeed. I can’t reproduce it here (searching for that album name yields results as expected).

Can you try importing that album with verbose logging enabled? It looks like there may be a bug lurking here.

On Aug 1, 2014, at 7:10 PM, William Brennan <will...@gmail.com> wrote:

Here's an example from today. I have all of these tracks, but it's telling me I'm missing so of them and I can't figure out why.

 

[William Brennan]

Here's another one where it's two CDs and when I apply it to the first one, I get the message about being in the library already and whether to overwrite, keep both or skip.

For an example that I'm really having trouble with, there's a release called "Arms Around EP" (link), if you take a look at the link you'll see the EP is made up of six songs from 5 different artists; however, I assume because La Fleur has 2 tracks on the EP, they make her the main artist. The problem is in my iTunes directory it separates each track into the folder corresponding to the artists folder on the track. So for this EP, I technically have 5 different folders under 5 different artist. Therefore, when beets get to one of the tracks to analyze it tells me I'm missing X number of songs. If I apply the changes, then once it gets to the nexy track in that same EP under a new artist, it tells me that: 

This item is already in the library!

[S]kip new, Keep both, Remove old  

When I've theoretically only added one track. I'll try to get you a photo tomorrow. Thanks man!

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WILLIAM BRENNAN TRUMPET p. 504.202.8433 will...@gmail.com wil...@trumpetgroup.com http://www.trumpetgroup.com

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[Adrian Sampson]

> On Aug 2, 2014, at 3:10 AM, William Brennan <will...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The problem is in my iTunes directory it separates each track into the folder corresponding to the artists folder on the track. So for this EP, I technically have 5 different folders under 5 different artist

This FAQ may lend some insight (i.e., use --flat):
http://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#import-a-multi-disc-album

You may also be interested in this issue:
https://github.com/sampsyo/beets/issues/112

[William Brennan]

Here's the perfect example of what I'm talking about. I have all the tracks for this release but it tells me that I'm missing any tracks that don't have La Fleur as an artist.

[Adrian Sampson]

As you observed earlier, this is because iTunes has split the album across multiple directories. You can either request that iTunes put it back together (I believe you discovered that the compilation flag does this) or follow the advice from the previous email.

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[William Brennan]

Is there a way to use the --flat option for the whole import of my library? I'm sure not how to use it the proper way after reading the documentation. 

Do I have to use it per artist? Could you give me and example of the code for importing with the --flat option?

Thanks for your help. 

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[Adrian Sampson]

That option combines *all* directories into a single album for tagging, so you probably don’t want to use it on your whole library!

Unless, of course, you use --group-albums to do metadata-based organization:

http://docs.beets.io/en/v1.3.6/reference/config.html#group-albums

[William Brennan]

​I gotcha, I'm just trying to figure out the best way to tag my existing library and not run into the "certain tracks missing" issue when it features a different artist. ​

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WILLIAM BRENNAN TRUMPET p. 504.202.8433 will...@gmail.com wil...@trumpetgroup.com http://www.trumpetgroup.com

[Gunt Valentine]

Hate to bump an old thread but it's the same problem I'm having. I'm trying to import my whole library at once and I have several compilations with different artists. Was wondering if there is a way to deal with this.

Thanks for your help. 

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WILLIAM BRENNAN TRUMPET p. 504.202.8433 will...@gmail.com wil...@trumpetgroup.com http://www.trumpetgroup.com

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[Adrian Sampson]

As long as the compilations are grouped into their own folders, the default importer settings should work fine for that situation.