Improvements for Album and Tracks view with list heading

[Steven]

one thing to keep in mind is the main panel is not resorted (intentional) after saving tags. You would need to press F5 or click the refresh button to see the full effect

[vivadavid]

@Redwing

I've followed all your steps and everything happened as expected. It's true that I did send you the captions after I deleted all the tags: you were asking me to try things and, at the same time, I kept having ideas that I wanted to put in practice. I guess I should have reported my problem once I had exhausted all my ideas, though when wrote my first post, I was completely lost. I apologize.

Having said that, I'm almost completely sure that there was no <ALBUM ARTIST> in that album because I don't like this tag and I make sure I delete it sistematically. It could have been the case that this tag was hidden if there's certainly such a thing as a hidden tag (I came up with this idea of hidden tags because I had once a problem in the Winamp library and somehow I fixed it by removing all the tags using that feature in MP3tag).

There's a big difference, though, between today's scenario and yesterday's. Today I could see the other tracks somewhere else, in a different group: I could, for example, search for track 27, which has a distinctive name. However, yesterday it wasn't the case that these four tracks were somewhere else: they just disappeared from the library as far as I could see.

If you're still interested, I could ask my brother to send me the album again, with the tags intact, as I keep a copy of my library in a hard drive in his flat.

Thanks!



@Steven

I'll take into account what you said about <F5>. What I did before, when I rescanned an album, was to go somewhere else in the library and move back in order to refresh the information.

[redwing]

OK. I have a theory about it, but I'd like to see the files first. Only two files would be enough: 1-01 & 1-02 track. If you PM me those files with original tags intact, I will have a look.

[vivadavid]

Thanks, redwing. As soon as I contact my brother and he sends me the files, I'll PM you.

[vivadavid]

Oh, one more thing: that album in my other hard drive doesn't have <DISCNUMBER> and <GROUPING>. Should I add these tags before I PM? Should I do anything else to them?

[redwing]

No, they are irrelevant. Just PM me them without touching original tags at all.

[vivadavid]

I've just sent you a PM, redwing! I hope you can get some conclusions from having a look at the tracks.

[vivadavid]

I've replaced the new version of the album with the old one containing my original tags and MB identifies all the 38 tracks.

[redwing]

I just got them, but there's nothing unusual. Can you reproduce your original problem with them?

[vivadavid]

redwing, I've been touching here and there and I can't reproduce the problem: I have no idea what happened. The funny thing is that the problematic tracks were the first tracks under every subheader: those are the tracks that vanished. I guess I must have done something wrong with the subgrouping header. At least, now it works.

It's not the first time, though, that I find an issue and I can't reproduce it later. For example, the Sent to ==> File Rescan feature doesn't always work for me and I always use it the same way. Earlier today I thought I had found the pattern for the bug, but then I couldn't reproduce it and I didn't report anything. This causes the same frustration that you feel when you have been persistently experiencing a problem with your computer, you take it to the technician and your laptop works smoothly.

[redwing]

OK. As long as it's working well, that's fine.

If you use MB's auto-organizing feature, you might want to re-organize the whole music files of yours with a different file-naming template. Make sure you include all tracks for re-organization by unticking "do not reorganize files with missing naming tags."

[vivadavid]

Thanks for the advice, although so far, I'm happy with my current scheme. Every album is stored in a single folder:

<ARTIST> - <ALBUM>

And every track corresponds to the structrure:

[TRACK] [TITLE]

Sometimes I think about replacing <ARTIST> with <ALBUMARTIST, and using <ARTIST> for those tracks in a particular album played by a different person (for example, the credits song at the end of a film), but I can see that using <ARTIST> and <ALBUMARTIST> in your library can cause conflicts.

I can see that MB is flexible when it comes to <ARTIST> and <ALBUMARTIST>. For example, when I'm on the main panel, using the Artwork view, there doesn't seem to make a difference if I choose "Group by artist" or "Group by album artist". I guess that, in my case, MB tries to find <ALBUMARTIST>, it doesn't find it and uses <ARTIST> instead.

[redwing]

My suggestion was for forcing to update file links to help resolve the occasional problem you mentioned. I never meant your current file-naming scheme is a faulty one. Even with adding or removing a space to the template, you can update all file links with new URLs.
 
Regarding <album artist> field, it wouldn't matter as long as you keep the field blank. Just keep in mind, though, if you get files with different values in that field that could cause a problem because of your album grouping setting.

[vivadavid]

I had misunderstood you, redwing. Do you mean Tools ==> Organise files? I had never seen this feature before. I suppose it's useful for those cases where people music's is everywhere in their hard disks and they want to move everything together. Does it serve another purpose?

[redwing]

So you don't auto-organize tracks with MB. In that case, rescan would update file links with "rescan files already in the library" option ticked.