Grouping of album with feat. artists

[mcl22]

Hi,

I've spent the whole morning looking for a solution but I was unlucky.

I used to separate feat. artists with a ";" in the past for the artist tag. That worked great. Some weeks ago I switched my HTPC Software from mediaportal to kodi. And since kodi is capable of reading the musicbrain tags I reorganized my whole music collection meaning that for example "Meat Loaf feat. Cian Coey" is now written to the artist tag. Kodi can distinguish by reading the musicbrainz artist ids and then separates the two artists.

So far so good. I didn't see any difference in musicbee because I have a separate music collection (only with a small collection) on my pc where I use musicbee. When I recently bought the new Meat Loaf album I tagged it in Picard and then saved one copy on my htpc for kodi and one on my normal pc. In kodi everthing is ok.
But when I first tried to play the album on my pc I recognized that only 6 of 10 songs were playing. I understand that musicbee won't recognize the mb artist ids and I understand that it creates (in this case) 5 artists because of the serveral "Meat Loaf feat. ....". But what I don't get is why it doesn't recognize that it is still one album.
Under grouping album-artist -> album name is selected. Even "files in one folder are an album" doesn't work.

The only thing I want to have is that when I choose "Meat Loaf" and then choose the album "Braver than we are" that all 10 songs are played.

I guess it's not a bug but I also can't find any solution for this. By the way, if I retag using "Meat Loaf; Cian Coey" it works. But that's not the way I want it (anymore).

Thanks for any help.

[theta_wave]

You can try grouping the album by <Album Artist> rather than <Arist>.  Picard tags the release artist as <Album Artist> if I'm not mistaken.  For <Artist>, a virtual tag (Preferences > Tag (1) > Define New Tags) might do the trick for Picard tagged files.  Think of virtual tags as a way to slice and dice existing tags (without altering them of course) to present them in a way you want them to be presented.  Just create one, name it accordingly and use either the formulas below:

Code

$Replace(<Artist>," feat.",;)

"Meat Loaf feat. Cian Coey" will now be "Meat Loaf; Cian Coey"

For longer <artist> credits like "A feat. B, C, D & E" (the following code even works with "A feat. B")

Code

$Replace($Replace($Replace(<Artist>," feat.",;),",",;)," &",;)

If you just want Meat Loaf, then

Code

$First($Replace(<Artist>,"feat.",;))

"Meat Loaf feat. Cian Coey" will now simply be "Meat Loaf"

If you want to know what the functions do, you can read more about them here: http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Functions

[mcl22]

Hi ssri,

thanks a lot for trying to help me.
First of all, my grouping is by <album artist> <album name> (preferences->sorting/grouping->grouping-> 1. album-artist 2. album-name).

For Meat Loaf feat. Cian Coey Picard does the following:
ALBUM   Braver than we are
ALBUMARTIST   Meat Loaf
ARTIST   Meat Loaf feat. Cian Coey
ARTISTS   Meat Loaf; Cian Coey
ARTISTSORT   Meat Loaf feat. Coey, Cian
...

I tried the virtual tags but unfortunately the only thing it does is to convert "Meat Loaf feat. Cian Coey" to "Meat Loaf; Cian Coey" (actually that's what it's supposed to do ). But MB doesn't treat it as it was tagged with a ";". Meaning that I then do have several artists called "Meat Loaf; Cian Coey" and so on. They are not treated as individual artists. And the result ist the same. When I click on Meat Loaf and then choose "Braver than we are" I still only get the tracks 1, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10. 4 tracks are missing, the ones with the feat. artists.

I still don't get it because as far as I understand it, MB is supposed to group all tracks with identical ALBUMARTIST && ALBUM(name) to one album. That means that the ARTIST shouldn't change anything about it, should it? And as mentioned before, it even doesn't work if I change grouping from albumartist-albumname to all files within a folder are an album.

Thanks again

[Bee-liever]

check your settings in
Preferences> Sorting/Grouping> grouping
that you have either 'albums are organised in their own folder' OR Album Artist is one of the fields that define an album selected

[mcl22]

Thank you Bee-liever,

but as described above, I have selected 1. Album Artist 2. Album Name (this value is fixed). But even if I change it to "albums are organized in their own folder" it doesn't work though every album has it's own folder.

[Bee-liever]

The only thing I want to have is that when I choose "Meat Loaf" and then choose the album "Braver than we are" that all 10 songs are played.

Then I also suggest you check that from where you're select "Meat Loaf" you are actually selecting 'album artist' and not just 'artist'

[mcl22]

Ok, usually I went this way:
Music-Explorer -> Genre (Rock) -> Meat Loaf  --- here MB showed 5 artists (incl. feat.) for Meat Loaf and when I selected "braver than we are" only 6 songs (instead of 10) were present. Also I couldn't find any way to select album artist there.

After your post I switched from genre to album artist view, so Music-Explorer -> Album Artist -> Meat Loaf and the 4 "feat." artists were shown. Clicking on Meat Loaf and selecting the album also showed only 6 songs.

Those 2 ways were/are working correctly if I tag the artist tag like "artist 1; artist 2" but not with "artist1 feat. artist 2".

But inspired by your post I switched to Music and then genre and then artist (there is no album artist to choose). But that finally works! I get Meat Loaf there and the album consists of all 10 songs.

Thanks a lot. (But still wondering why it doesn't work in music explorer - the mechanism to find out if it's one album should be the same, shouldn't it? )

[Steven]

i can see the filter panel is a little flawed in its handling for multi-value tagging so i am going to make some fixes to that although i am not sure it its the same issue you are having

[Steven]

http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V3_0/MusicBee3_Patched.zip

unzip and copy the files to where musicbee is installed