Hi,
I have a music collection of appr. 20.000 songs, all flac or mp3-files , and use ‘MP3tag’ successful for years now to to tag the collection, and I’ve never had much problems, so far. I use Logitech Media Server on a NAS to stream my music all over the house, mostly to a Cambridge Audio CXNv2, and therefore I use an app on the smartphone, called ‘StreamMagic’. Using this combination of tools is satisfying for me in general, but there are some problems that I encountered over the years where I didn’t pay very much attention to, until now.
I have the habit to tag the Artist in the syntaxis, eg. ‘Mc Donald, Amy’ or ‘Knopfler, Mark’, and not ‘Amy Mc Donald, or Mark Knopfler. No big problems with this, but while choosing songs, starting from ‘Artist’, I mentioned there is still eg. ‘John Lennon’ or ‘Leonard Cohen’ in the list showing on my LMS media server, although I tought my tagging was correct. This problem is persisting for about 450 songs (2,5% of the entire collection). Searching the cause of this problem brought me to the following:
All the problem files are flac files
Always one tag that confuses me: ‘AlbumArtist’, although I only use this tag in MP3tag for compilations, or for tagging with an extra Artist,eg. ‘London Symphonic Orchestra’.
I deleted that tag with MP3tag for almost the entire collection, except for as mentioned above.
In my ‘cause-search’, I used another (winbdows) program to read out the tags for my entire collection, called ‘FileList’ (FileList.exe), and that gave ‘stunning’ results for me:
The tag ‘Album Artist’ (‘System.Music.AlbumArtist’) is filled up for most of the collection, mostly without problems except for the 450 songs as mentioned above, and my problem is that I can’t delete the content of the tag ‘System.Music.AlbumArtist’ via the program MP3tag.
Is there anyone who can guide me towards a solution for this problem ?
tnx
Please show us the screenshot of the extended tags dialgoue Alt-T for a single one of such a file.
If it is a flac file, also the Mapping in File>Options>Tags>Mapping would be nice to be seen in a screendump.
In general: the field ALBUMARTIST should be filled for all files - otherwise it is very likely that you get a lot of tracks from compilations that show up as individual albums instead of from one album.
Unfortunately, the extended tags dialogue does not show the dialogue title.Also, it looks like you selected more than one file.
Could you repeat that with the selection of just a single file of the 450.
The dialogue title shows the tags in the file.
The mapping looks like the wrong way round and I am pretty sure that you do not need any mapping for ALBUMARTIST in flac files (VorbisComments)
Does this dialogue show any unexpected data?
From my point of view the file has only FLAC tags (no stacked other ones like ID3V1 or V2) and it also does not have data in the field ALBUM ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST or BAND.
So this file should not behave in a strange way.
Also, it seems to be from an artist that looks ok as it is "Dolphy, Eric", exactly
This is a screenshot of another 'bad' album. The column 'Album Artist' is empty, and that was also my goal. I selected 1 song and this is the extended tag info:
I see that the list of metadata is completely different from the Dolphy one , +, ALBUM ARTIST is 'david knopfler', which I don't like .
I don't understand the empty column in relation to the filled 'ALBUM ARTIST'-tag.
Am I doing something wrong ? Also, I see the same in the windows properties of that file:
To understand it better, you would have to show us a screenshot from the column definition for "Album Artist". For this, right click next to "Album Artist" in the column header and then "Customize columns".
In my case, it looks like this:
If you are sure that you want to delete a tag (including the content), you press ALT + T as for your screenshots, then you select the tag you want to delete, for example YEAR and then press the red X - Icon
Then you press OK and the tag will be gone.
Hint: This works for one or multiple selected tracks at once.
In your screenshot for the column definitions, your value is based on using albumartist (no space) but the field is using album artist (with a space). Based on your prior image showing your extended tags as having the space, I would change the Value component there to match the Field box with %album artist% to get this data to show up in your list.
The column definition shows that you show the contents of a variable ALBUMARTIST and then you write that info to the field ALBUM ARTIST - which is a different one.
Both, value, and field should point to the same variable unless you want to have a read only field.
What happens if you also enter for value ALBUM ARTIST?
And this is the extended tag view of one of the tracks
After I've done this:
I changed the 'value' into %albumartist%.
Sorry but I didn't understand very well what you (all) were tryin' to explain.
Thanks very much for the patience...
If your tag is written as ALBUM ARTIST (with a space), then your column configuration has to match it with a Value: and Field: like this:
If you find a tag written as ALBUMARTIST (one word, no space) in your files, you could add an additional column with
The content of Value: und Field: has to match your tag name, otherwise you can't see the content of your tag in the column. (For the first box called Name you can choose whatever you want, even SomethingStrangeHappens works. This is only what you will see as title for this column.)
By putting all the pieces together, the problem seems resolved, though I still don't understand everything 'in depth'.
But for shure, thanks to your input, step by step I'm approaching the level of understanding what I'm doing.
Anyway, thank you all very much for the patient and positive input.
Grtz,
kde
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