Add option to NOT show tracks with different artists as different albums

[Volki-57]

I have multiple game/movie soundtracks and collection albums in my music library and more often than not these albums tend to have tracks from multiple artists. Currently the app divides such albums and creates an album for each artist for both the UI and the Ampache/Subsonic APIs which creates unnecessary clutter for music libraries that has many soundtrack albums.

I think either an option should be added to make the app not divide albums based on artist name

or, ideally Ampache behavior should be replicated and albums with the same name should be displayed as a single album by default and only should be divided if MBID exists and different.

[paulijar]

I first thought that your problem happens because you are missing the Album artist tag from your files because that's the usual case in reports/requests like this. But now looking closer, your screenshot doesn't show any artist names and it seems to show albums grouped under single album artist so apparently that's not the case. If all the files share a common Album artist tag, then having different Track artists on each track doesn't cause the tracks to be split into multiple albums. But is there maybe some subtle differences in how the Album name tag has been typed on each track?

[Volki-57]

I first thought that your problem happens because you are missing the Album artist tag from your files because that's the usual case in reports/requests like this.

That might be the case here as I am sure Album name tag is the same for all tracks (btw I used multiple music players in the past and none of them had an issue like this so I am sure it is not related with album name). However I have more than 2000 tracks in my library and dozens of albums. It would take too much time to add an album artist tag for each of them.

I think having an option to not seperate albums when album artist tag is missing would be useful for cases like this.

[paulijar]

But something weird and unexpected is going on here for sure. Can you show the track details for the two versions of that song "Jealousy"?

[paulijar]

And also, what is the parent category above these albums which has been cut off from the original screenshot?

[Volki-57]

Oh I see what you mean. Sorry the initial screenshot is a bit misleading. Those albums consists of two discs and each disc have a different album name (see below).

album: DJMAX BLACK SQUARE OST (REMASTERED) Disc 1
album: DJMAX BLACK SQUARE OST (REMASTERED) Disc 2

I don't mind them being separate albums. However the ones bellow should be a single album:

Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 4

Also instead of grouping albums by artist, maybe Albums and Artists should be a separate menu. (Albums menu grouped by albums and Artists grouped by artist)

[paulijar]

Oh, so the original screenshot didn't actually visualize the problem case at all. Then it's definitely the missing Album artist.

However I have more than 2000 tracks in my library and dozens of albums. It would take too much time to add an album artist tag for each of them.

You don't have to add the Album artist tag to all the files, just the ones having the problem. Furthermore, with a good mass-tagging software, adding the "Various artists" tag to many files at once is actually super easy thing to do. I have used the Mp3tag software to great avail on many of my mass-tagging needs. But for a simple case like this, even the built-in editor of the foobar2000 player works great. And I'm sure there are many other alternatives, too.

[Volki-57]

I see thanks for the input. However, I do still think having an option in the settings to change the behavior would be useful as Ampache and other music player's default behavior is different.

[paulijar]

Maybe so. But the flip side of this is that every new user option increases the "test surface" of the app, which will either slow down the development in the long run or increase the risk of subtle bugs. User settings related to files scanning are especially bad since testing the scanning is more cumbersome than most other things.

Also, your preferred way to handle albums with multiple artists is not as simple as you might first think. The data model of the application is based on the concept where each track belongs to one album and each album belongs to one album artist. With our current scanning logic, we can always place each scanned track directly to the correct album and each found album directly to the correct album artist. Now, if we were combining tracks with varying artists into single album, then under which album artist should we place that album? Maybe we could create automatically an artist called "Various artists" when we detect such a case, but this would mean that we could no longer make the final decision of the album artist name the moment we scan the first track of the album. Instead, we would potentially need to alter previously created albums retroactively once we find out that there are multiple artists involved. And the same thing would happen again whenever any file is deleted or modified: we would need to check again, if the album still contains more than one artist and adjust the album artist accordingly. All this is doable but quite a bit more complicated than the current logic.

There are currently 108 open issues in this project. Realistically, I can solve maybe 10-20 issues per year. Meanwhile, there will be 20-30 new issues per year. Considering that this problem can be easily avoided by proper tagging, it's not very likely that it would ever reach the top of the to-do list.

[Volki-57]

I understand and really appreciate your efforts. I just wanted to give my idea, no need to rush anything. Maybe someone with enough skill set and also interested in this future can provide a PR in the future.

[mattwellss]

@Volki-57 I hope you don't mind if I offer another user-data-focused fix: MusicBrainz Picard. It's a partially-automated tool that tries to normalize the track tags. The albums you're having issues with seem to be present on there, and seem to be properly tagged as Various Artists https://musicbrainz.org/release/1618d635-0a42-4ef6-a4c3-c1c6a76bce36, https://musicbrainz.org/release/7bb84fdd-d9b9-4492-8de9-43d9a36c7e20 (etc)

I had plenty of trouble prior to handing control of my library, especially multi-artist and multi-disc albums.