ID3 to folder structure and various artists

[Sean Inglis]

I've spent a while importing some compilation CDs after renaming and moving them to follow the stipulated file and folder structure.

Browsing artists is now relatively painless, but browsing albums is still a mess.

Each of the CDs in the set appears as a different apparently identical album multiple times, with an entry for every track on the CD.

Is there a solution to this?

[Sean Inglis]

Hnmm. I've attached an external CD ROM and ripped a single compilation CD - "80's Symphonic" as you ask - to see how the BB1 handles it, and the answer seems to be that it essentially ignores the issue by ignoring the individual artists.

I can see how this skirts round multiple album entries, but it's a pretty meh solution. There's a lot to love about this thing - the ripping was fast and flawless with a £30 generic USB drive for instance - but this is a minus.

[Daniel Taylor]

I'm not clear on exactly what you're seeing.  Could you give an example?

[Sean Inglis]

I've zapped several times to experiment, but it boils down to this, either:

Importing existing MP3s

I have a lot of neatly tagged compilation albums where each track has a different artist and title, but a common album name.

I rename these files so they adhere to the following structure for import:

Artist A

    Compilation CD1

        01 Song 1

        03 Song 3

Artist B

    Compilation CD1

        02 Song 2

        04 Song 4

        05 Song 5

Artist C

    Compilation CD1

        06 Song 6

        07 Song 7

After importing these from USB and rescanning for good measure, I expect that "Artists" will list me 3 artists, and "Albums" will list one album - "Compilation CD1" - and that if I select it, that will allow me to play all of the tracks on that album.

What actually happens is that I end up with 3 entries in "Albums" for "Compilation CD1" and I can't tell what tracks I'll actually get. So the DB makes no link between the identically named album folders.

- OR -

BB1 Rips the Cd

If I allow the BB1 to rip from a source compilation CD so that it has total control, it doesn't honour different artists per track: all artists for that CD are labelled as "Various Artists".

This means I only have one "Compilation CD1" entry, but I lose the ability to select by artist.

I understand I can sort-of work around this by including the artist in the trackname and searching, or manually creating playlists, but it's annoying when the data is already there.

[PMB]

Hi Sean,

I think this is down to the way the BB1 (and B2) catalogues music so it is generating 3 Albums -

Artist 1 - Compilation CD1 - Tracks

Artist 2 - Compilation CD1 - Tracks

Artist 3 - Compilation CD1 - Tracks

Paul

Brennan Support.

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Hi Sean.

If I am missing the point, I apologise, BUT are you sure that you are importing this structure 

where "music", "Artist" and "Album" are all directories/folders

and

"Tracks" are files (containing the music data). The Track names must start with an integer number and the sequence of that number is used by the BB1/B2 as the track number.

Mp3 "Tags" are NOT used or recognised by B2s or BB1s .

The actual folder name given to "Artist 1", "Artist 2" must be the artist in question and in your case,  the "Album" names will be 'Compilation CD1'

However, if you do this and load a second Compilation 1 CD which also contains tracks by "Artist 1" the tracks will be merged with what is already there under 'Compilation CD1'.

Fred

[Daniel Taylor]

In this regard, everything is working as it is supposed to.  The three "Album" folders named " Compilation CD1" are themselves within different "Artist" folders, so they are distinct.  What I do in similar cases is rename them and add the artist name to the album folder.  For instance, I have quite a number of "Best of" albums, and when you see them in the Album view, you can't tell one from another.  So I rename to say "Best of (Deep Purple)," and so on.

[Sean Inglis]

Hi Fred,

Yes, I took a look through the other threads and found a similar diagram and followed it for my tests. The behaviour I see is that the album level folders are not merged as I'd expect

I understand the lack of tag support and have fairly strong views on that, but it isn't happening so I'm resigned to some restructuring. None of my other consumers of these files care about physical filename and structure - they just do a quick rescan and they're off - so aside from time I don't lose much by doing it.

I'm generally in favour of opinionated design decisions like these, but it isn't always obvious what the full consequences are until you use things for a while.

And then it doesn't matter how beautifully my files are tagged, if I never think to play them they may as well not exist, so swings and roundabouts.

[Sean Inglis]

Just as designed, just not as I'd expect. Ah well.

Yes I've gone down a similar route except "Deep Purple - Best of" and similar, A few passes with picard to fix a some naming issues, and compress some rogue flacs and and I should be sorted, thanks.

[JFBUK]

Hi,

I get round this by keeping the Artist = Various Artists and making the individual track artist part of the track name - e.g.

09 She Smiled Sweetly [Billy Bragg].flac

As I rip on my PC I use the ripping software to automatically create the file name based on the tags.

Mp3tag is able to batch rename I think.

https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

John

[Sean Inglis]

Hi John,

Thanks. I'm using a combination of EasyTag on Linux and some manual directory renaming to get to the structure I want/ I didn't find any of the wholly automated solutions resulted in generating a folder structure and moving files in a way that I trusted, based on tests on a small portion of files.

A few more tests and I think I'll adopt your strategy of a second pass to stick the artist name on the end of the song title - a nice bit of extra information and good for ad-hoc filtering.

Thanks (and to everyone for suggestions)

S