• Device: Sony Walkman NW-A306
• OS: Android 14
• Symfonium Version: 11.4.0
• Media Provider: Local Device > Split Albums by: Album Artist (other options unticked)
• Artist Filter Options: Hide Composers Only on/ticked
Hi there,
Having an issue, I suspect is user error or related to metadata and how Symfonium handles it. I have uploaded the affected albums for an artist I’m testing on and made the appropriate offering of logs. I have been testing with (5 albums, Alice Cooper) so hope that will help determine what I’m doing wrong.
For some of the Artists in my Local Library, Symfonium has split the Artists into multiple entries and divided the albums (Please see attached image). Testing on one of the affected Artists, in this case Alice Cooper, I can see in the following Albums: Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits, Killer and School’s Out, however “The Best of Alice Cooper” and “Welcome to my Nightmare” have been split into a separate artist entry despite all have the same entries in MB Picard for Artist, Album Artist etc (Please see attached image for specific fields).
Curiously, in the first Artist entry 3 songs for “The Best of Alice Cooper” appear under “Appears on” for the 1st Artist entry despite the album being attributed to the 2nd Artist entry.
Those three songs are: Billion Dollar Babies, No More Mr. Nice Guy and Under My Wheels.
I have been trying to use these three as my jumping off point to determine my error, but can’t seem to figure out why it’s attributing those three songs to the 1st Artist entry as a contributor but still splitting the Albums between two Artist entries?
Finding this support thread: Albums Not Appearing Under Album Artist I have tried to change the entries and determine whether Symfonium thinks there is complications etc, I just can’t determine which metadata field/Symfonium setting I have ticked that could be the root cause.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Any further info/songs/logs required for triage, let me know.
Logs:
Upload description: Falklands89 Logs.zip & Falklands89 - Alice Cooper Albums.zip
Artists with the same name but different MBIds are different artists since that’s the base usage of that tag.
If you use MBIds you need to be sure that it matches everywhere for a single Artist.
Symfonium takes the liberty to merge an artist without MBId with an artist with MBId if they have exactly the same name and there’s only 1 MBId for that artist.
So if there’s 3 Alice Cooper, some without MBId some with Id 1 and some with Id 2 then you end up with multiple artists. Or 2 Alice Cooper with 2 different MBId.
Thank you Tolriq. Aside from me having custard for brains, I’m also learning Symfonium and MB Picard at the same time. I really appreciate the insight.
This is quite tricky, and using MB mandates some more caution depending on what you want to achieve. Often enough similar setups like the Alice Cooper one come up, especially in jazz releases, where Miles Davis, Miles Davis Quartet, Miles Davis Quintet, Miles Davis Nonet etc. might all be different artists from MB perspective, and then there Miles Davis and X, or Y feat. Miles Davis, or other combinations.
I “correct” those releases to all have “Miles Davis” (and the fitting MB ID) as album artist. That way the end up under one artist in the library.
With LMS as provider I end up with 2 artists when I add a new album and tag it with an artist/albumartist MBID but the old albums do not have an artist/albumartist MBID.
I fix these cases when I notice them but the way Symfonium apparently handles it (merge if there are only 1 with MBID and an identical one without MBID) seems smart. Is that something you might be willing to implement as well, @itm?
I’m not sure I understand. I only see a problem when there are more than 2 cases with the same name.
I had one such case a while ago.
2 different John Butlers (different artists) with 2 different MBIDs + a few old albums without MBIDs. In this case merging makes no sense as you can’t tell which MBID to merge the albums without MBID with.
However when there’s only one artist with MBID and one without MBID with the same name, what prevents merging these 2? If they are indeed different artists you could always tag the one without MBID with an MBID to split them up again but it’s far more likely that they are the same artist and some albums simply miss the tag.
I have almost only well tagged artists/releases (using mbids), I don’t want to mix with badly tagged stuff, that are kept separated so that I can tackle them.
But I can add an option to control that behavior, no problem!
I can’t edit/append to my original post, I think coz I marked it as solved. But for anyone who is starting out like me and finds all of the above useful and use this as a resource, here’s a brief introduction to MB Picard that’s helpful.
Personally I consider this introduction as possibly harmful since it does not really mention just how prone to errors the MB picard clustering and matching is.
Especially when you just throw in a bunch of random songs it’s very hard for it to tell if the song belongs to the studio album, the single, the EP or a compilation album. So simply throwing it all in there and applying changes can open up a can of worms later on when you notice that it matched wrong and now you have lost whatever limited information the file contained before MB Picard overwrote it.
The Introduction also does not mention one of the more useful MB Picard features, AcoustID, which can often match songs that contain no information at all.
As I personally pretty much only work with full albums, all the clustering and matching in MB Picard is unwanted and often wastes more of my time than it is helpful. That’s why I instead get the MusicBrainz tags via the musicbrainz expanded web source script in mp3tag. It’s really fast and precise if you have full albums and retrieves the same data (with minor differences).
