Issue description:
When trying to cache one specific artist, no action seems to be taken and no songs are queued for download. Neither direct command to cache, nor auto cache seem to do anything.
Caching a random few of his albums, or caching a different artist, starts the downloads properly, so there’s probably some specific weirdness in one (or more?) places.
Logs:
Upload description: Roukanken
Additional information:
Logs are from me taking these steps:
- Open app and go to specific artist (Kuroneko Lounge)
- Request caching of whole artist
- Look into download queue if anything is in there
- Repeat 1-3, but request auto caching
- Also try to manually trigger the auto cache rule
Edit: Cache was specifically emptied before reproduction in the logs, to ensure nothing gets in the way of reproduction, and is currently listed as empty. Noting this, as I can see a select of non-offline songs returning zero results in the logs
Reproduction steps:
I don’t think this is easily reproducible, as everything else I randomly tried to cache, does so properly.
Media provider:
Jellyfin
Screenshots:
Oh, I think I figured out what’s causing this. It’s because the artist I selected is not an artist, but a personal circle of an artist, that is an album artist. In reality, he has no songs that have him as a track artist. (Even though most of the songs are actually his, they aren’t listed under his label of “Kuroneko Lounge”, but have him under nickname “Rin”)
This then has to affect every album artist I have, but most of them have at least some songs to their name. It would also cache such artists only partially, which explains why I only downloaded <20GB of cache on artist I know he has 33GB of music.
Anyway, this would make this be more of a feature request than bug, even though I have to say that flow of “Album Artist → [Artist] → “Has 10 albums” → Cache artist → nothing happens” is very unexpected.
Note that the same issue plagues the Album Artist summary screen - it only shows “X albums” without any song info, and on other album artists it skips over most of their songs, only counting those that have them as track artist.
This is normal and documented. You cache songs and songs have durations.
An album artist of a compilation does not make him the artist of the songs. There’s many cases like that where you can’t just blindly make album songs the artist songs of the album artist.
You can use smart playlists to download all songs from tracks of albums where he is the album artist.
Hmmm, I guess it comes from different expectations then. I can’t really argue there that there are albums where this behavior wouldn’t be very appropriate, as the world of music is just really wide and weird.
Anyway, I can always cache on album level to be more precise, and smart playlists are the solution to the world’s hunger (thanks for that tip), so this is not a problem. I’ll just list points where my disconnect from the UX comes from, and we can close this 
:
- On artist page, I would expect that song count & song duration would be consistent with, for example, what comes from “shuffle” button (minus issues like max song count in queue ofc). Even though the songs may not be strictly be the artists, they are still played as part of shuffle or mix. This effectively makes song count & duration on the page a meaningless measure, at least for me.
- Artist page presents “Albums” and “Appears on”, which make it seem like pretty clear ownership in the first case, and therefore it’s fairly confusing that if I come and select all albums, then more of the songs get downloaded than if I just cached the artist (unless he appears on a lot of other albums).
- To compare this point, take for example if the “Shuffle” button on the artist page would only play the songs of track artist, and yet if you chose an album it would play it whole. This is the exact same situation as with the cache, just with more immediate feedback to the user.
It was consistent until users kept complaining that play button was missing or was doing nothing so I added a fallback to play album artist.
Doing that on playback makes little harm, wrongly downloading tons of songs would make a lot more.
1 Like
Honestly, this is the kind of problem that UX surveys get done for. Would be fun to see what option would win in the eyes of users. And it’s not something that can be changed without a long and giant breaking change warning, due to the auto download…
Anyway, thanks for answers, and sorry for wasting time; while I searched the forums for cache stuff, I haven’t found the documentation stuff for this.
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