Auto search artwork searching Album/Album Artist first?

[phatjon]

Hello!

I have only just discovered Musicbee and I am SO impressed! 

My previous music manager was Mediamonkey.  My relationship with the program has soured somewhat over the years and I have now given up on it as the buggy, frustrating piece of s...oftware that it has become.   What a wonderful surprise to find Musicbee!

I have a question regarding the auto search for album/track art.

As my music mainly consists of single tracks (as opposed to whole albums) I have tagged all my tracks as album "#" and album artist "Various".  This plays nice with iTunes and Google Music as filling out the Album Artist with the Artist name in the past has meant that I have to sift through 10000+ albums named after the thousands of different artists in my library. This way, I have one huge album "#" with all my tracks and can find the few full albums I have easily.  I do not fill out the album name if I do not have the full album - my way of keeping tabs on the full albums I have and escape the ugly looking "Unknown Album" field on my iPod and iPhone which comes up when the field is left blank.

OK, so that is my setup.  Now, Musicbee has read all my tracks and searches for album/track art.  The results come back with the same "Frozen" OST Artwork for all tracks missing artwork.   It must be reading the Various and # each time first even though the window says it is searching for the track name (Mediamonkey would search for track and artist and consistently give good results - one of the things it did do well).   How do I get Musicbee to ignore these fields in the search if this is what is happening?  If anyone can suggest a better solution for my track tags that I could try that would be awesome.  I thought I had fixed my tags - for iOS and Google Music it did, for Musicbee it is causing this problem.

Thank you in advance
Phatjon

[psychoadept]

Hi, welcome to the forum!

If you make Album Artist and Album blank, MB will search for Title and Artist.  I realize that messes up your configuration, but I think it's the only way.

However, if you also set all tracks to "iTunes Compilation = Yes" (on the settings page, in the tag editor), then go to Sorting/Grouping preferences and set the Album Artist you want to use, MB will handle the "Various Artists" part for you (and Steven recently changed it so that it ignores that album artist for Artwork search).

Here are some pages that may help you:

http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Tagging#Settings
http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Sorting_%26_Grouping

[phatjon]

Thank you for the reply.

I've tried a few things over the last few days.  Leaving both fields blank does search correctly using Title & Artist fields. Seems that when the Album Artist is blank, now it fills in automatically the Artist name if changing directly in library view which it did not do before (I think!...).

Anyways, if I understand correctly, and to double check before I go ahead and do this change: I need to mark all files as one big compilation - album "#" - which in turn automatically makes album artist "Various Artists".  I wonder what impact that will have in Google Music?  I am about to delete all uploaded music because there are tagging inconsistencies there that a driving me nuts and I can't cope with managing yet another library of music (even though changes are supposed to be synced they are not).  One library keeps me plenty busy!

Cheers
phatjon

 

[psychoadept]

It has always been MusicBee's behavior to fill in the Artist when Album Artist is blank UNLESS you've ticked the box in Sorting/Grouping preferences to assign compilations a particular album artist.  So in addition to marking all the files as a compilation, be sure you've configured Sorting/Grouping preferences.  Sounds like you're getting the hang of it. 

[phatjon]

Tested on 10 tracks.  I need to delete whatever is there in album artist, check the itunes compilation -(which then fills it in again) then save, for the auto search to work properly.

Is there a way to add more search providers - wikipedia and discogs are probably the best (I have found) rescources for album art, especially for electronic music.  Any way to add these sites?  Or perhaps a suggestion - clicking on a result (or non result) when doing a "search internet" could open up a browser google image search

 ***EDIT - You can do a further search by clicking on google in the search internet window.... cool!.
*********EDIT AGAIN! I found the edit tabs in the Playing Track Layout for the adding different websites.....excellent!  I think that covers everything

Cheers
phatjon