I’d like to have an option to ignore folders when detecting albums. This would be helpful for multi disc albums to prevent each disc showing up as a separate album in the list.
To prevent problems like grouping unrelated content, this probably could be bound to MB album IDs, e.g. “Prefer MB album ID to folders” (or something like that)
Problem solved:
I mainly listen to complete albums and for multi-disc albums it would me more convenient to just have one entry in the album list. Otherwise I’d have to “play” disc 1 first, then “queue” disc 2.
Brought benefits:
Better looking album lists. Think of larger compilations like “The Complete John Coltrane” consisting of 8 discs…
Other application solutions:
Poweramp on Android uses this kind of Album detection. When tapping on a multi-disc album you just get a concatenated list of all tracks. Looks a bit strange, because e.g. after track 9 there is track 1 again (belonging to disc 2)
MusicBee on Windows solves this by having two options to group albums: by folder OR by the Album Title tag and additional tags the user can select to fine-tune the behavior.
Additional description and context:
Probably only applies to collections using this folder structure:
/artist/album1 - CD1/
/artist/album1 - CD2/
/artist/album2/
I like this structure because then I don’t have to prefix my file names by the disc number…
Symfonium fully support the disc tag. Usually multi disc albums are all in the same folder and the tags and file naming split things.
You’d see them properly separated and ordered in Symfonium.
The problem about not taking in account folders, is that most people don’t properly tag things and you end up with tongs of bad cases and users requesting tons of different settings to handle all their special use cases. I’m not sure I want to start supporting all the possible cases here. Even added as an option, users will click on it then complain.
After putting all files into one folder the Album view really looks nice, the detail view even shows “Disc x” separators allowing to play each disc separately!
I’ll consider reorganizing all multi-disc albums then…
I tested the new settings in 5.2.0 beta 1 — but only combinations of “Folder” and/or “MB ID”:
Seems to be working very well, I tried various settings even with mixed tags (some albums having MB IDs, some not. Some having " - CDx" suffixes in the Album Title, some not).
All combinations worked nicely, I could not get any “weird” looking results. Just checking “MB ID” seems to use the Album Title (“ALBUM” tag) for grouping anyways, because even albums without MB IDs are grouped perfectly fine according to their title.
Folder and MBId is the default and how it works in 5.1 too.
And yes the Album tag is always used, the other fields are to differentiate when to split. But sounded more logical to present as grouping option.
For your special use case, yes it’s normal not much can be done here, the app does what it’s told to. Most users would have set the disc tag, else they’ll need to fix their tags.
