Problem with MP3 "Discnumber/TPOS" Tag

Support
1

I have a number of live concerts by a particular artist that I've organized into folders using the date/place of the performance, for instance "1975 Bottom Line". Most of these rips were made from multi-CD sets which if the "Discnumber" tag were present in the MP3 files would cause my Squeezebox Server software to show the performance as three different albums:

1975 Bottom Line (Disc 1 of 3)
1975 Bottom Line (Disc 2 of 3)
1975 Bottom Line (Disc 3 of 3)

Because I want all the tracks listed under one album, I stripped out the Discnumber tag using Mp3tag and all seemed fine... Except for one particular concert set. No matter what I do Squeezebox insists on spliting the performance into three albums.

I've checked the tags in these files using Mp3tag and foobar2000 and there is no Discnumber listed. I've changed them from ID3v2.4 to ID3v2.3. I've removed them from my library, done a full rescan, put them back and done another full rescan, but nothing works. I've used Mp3tag to strip all tags from the files and recreated them manually but still the same problem.

Is there some other place in the MP3 tag structure where this information is stored (TPOS, whatever that is?) and how can I get rid of it?

Any other suggestions? Thanks.

2

A few thoughts:

  • If you haven't tried it already, select all of these files within Mp3tag, right click, and look at the extended tags. That will be a pretty good way to see what you really have.

  • Use a hex reader to look into any file more closely. There are lots of free readers you can find in a few seconds by googling and they are easy to use if you are just viewing files.

  • Are all the tracks you want grouped together assigned the same album name? If not, make them so and then see if they are grouped the way you want in Squeezebox. Also check to see if the grouping within Squeezebox is set to group just by album name, or some combination of tags. If a combination, see what your tags say for each of the tags in that combination across these files.

  • sometimes your track numbering scheme contains information on the number of discs that applications can extract. do you have several track #1's across these three discs? Perhaps you need to renumber so that you don't have duplicate track numbers (some people use "101", "201" etc to indicate the first track of each disc in albums they've grouped under a common album name).

I hope that helps

3

Have you checked the albumartist? It should be the same for all of these albums.
In the default setting MP3tag does not show the albumartist.
My guess is that perhaps some albums have and others do not have the albumartist set.

4

Good suggestions, thanks. I know I checked extended tags and all tracks were same ALBUM and ALBUM ARTIST. Track numbers were also ok. I had already used Mp3tag to delete all tags and start fresh but problem remained. I ended up solving the problem by brute force: used TidyMP3 to strip all but music frames from the files and retagged them manually.

5

Please note that a tag of the name ALBUM ARTIST (with blank in the middle) does not match ALBUMARTIST (no blank for separation).
The correct MP3tag for ALBUMARTIST is the one without. THe one with blank was, I think, an old foobar notation.
If the albumartist (or band in the older versions) is not set, then an album may be split up.