Album song/track order

[mgerardco]

Hi,
 
 I've been using MusicBee for a few years now without any major problems, or at least with small enough problems that they could be fixed with a minimum amount of work. That, after upgrading to the newest iteration, is not the case now. My library is now in complete disarray, with album song/track order completely messed up- there is no longer a logical sequence. And to further screw things up, multiple disc albums now have songs from each disc mixed with the other disc(s). There is no rhyme or reason as to which albums this happens to and which are not affected. Additionally, complete albums, that have always been complete albums, are now missing songs/tracks. I can usually find the songs after searching for them in the computer, but I'm at a loss as to why they became lost and why MusicBee can't find them on its own. I do still use iTunes, which hasn't had an organizational problem, just an album art problem. Am I doing something wrong? Is there an easy fix? Or do I have to uninstall/reinstall MusicBee and hope for the best? Going into every album and editing all the info just isn't practical and entirely too long of a process. That's why I got MusicBee in the first place- to organize my music, correctly and automatically. I just want it to do what it once did. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

mgerardco

[phred]

The first thing that comes to mind is: are all your tracks tagged properly? Specifically album names, track numbers, and album artist?

I'm sure others here will have some thoughts on this.

[psychoadept]

Be sure to check the sorting tab inn the tag editor. I don't know what version you upgraded from, but the way sorting is done changed fairly recently, so that could be the culprit.  It can look a mess but should be easy enough to fix, because fixing one instance of an error there should correct all of them.

[mgerardco]

Good Morning.

Thanks for the quick reply, but the problem still persists. I checked the tag editor settings and everything seems to be in order so I'm not sure that that is the problem. I took one album, 444 by the Nighthawks, and ran the tag editor by album. In the tag editor the sequence is absolutely correct, the album name is correct, the artist is correct- in short theoretically the album should be appearing in MusicBee exactly in that form but it does not. the song sequence is STILL incorrect. A quick check of about 10 other albums, albums that were once in MusicBee correctly, shows the same song/track sequence problem. Additionally, albums that are compilations, like Alligator Records 25th Anniversary Album, are entirely broken up but not the way that would make logical sense, like one album listing by each artist. Sometimes there are single artists, sometimes 2,3,or 4 artists. None of this makes any sense to me because the albums were added to MusicBee directly from cds and were organized properly by album, artist, disc number and sequence, without having to fool around with tagging, which is why I liked MusicBee. One of the albums I checked, Ain't No More Love In This House by Lou Pride, comes up in the "tag by album" correctly for album art, album name, and song number, but the body of the album below the album heading shows up as artist "Astrid" with entirely wrong song titles and showing 2 discs, not one.Usually you can scroll through to find the correct album to tag from, but not in this instance- Lou Pride doesn't show up at all. Clearly something has gone wrong on the MusicBee end. It all started with the update to 3.1. I am NOT going to edit 5000 albums, especially when they were entered correctly to begin with.

Thanks,

mgerardco

[frankz]

Are you viewing your library by Artist or Album Artist?  Where are you seeing this?

A screenshot would help.  Having trouble following where you're seeing a problem and how the problem is showing up.

If your albums are tagged properly, it's a setup problem, not a MusicBee program problem.

[phred]

Specific to the mixed up compilations - are you using the Album Artist tag? If not, that could be part of the problem. Try testing one or two of the compilations and make Album Artist "Various Artists"  If Album Artist is left  blank, MB assumes Artist = Album Artist. Which would result in the album being split all over the place.

[mgerardco]

Well, thanks for the responses. The compilation album problem did indeed resolve after fiddling with the preferences and a little trial and error. The track out-of-order took a few days to figure out- maybe I'm missing something in preferences because I could not find any way to resolve the whacko way every track on the albums were listed, but finally hit something that put everything in order again. Again is the operative word here because for the life of me I can't understand why updating MusicBee would scatter and disorganize my library. I would think that the default position, for every album added to your library, would be as it is on the cd that it was uploaded from and not having to choose a format or order at all, let alone having to retag the album. It just seems that starting from exactly as the album, track order, artist, etc. is on the cd would naturally be the starting point. If, after adding the album to the library you want to make a change, go ahead and change it. I'm also confused as to why this would happen, after an update, to an existing MusicBee library, which was correctly organized. Its also puzzling why some of my albums are now incomplete and have to be searched for in my computer in order to put them back in their albums. And there are quite a few albums like this. The odd thing is that when they are found , the MusicBee icon is in front of them- why wouldn't MusicBee find its own files?! I think MusicBee has become too complicated for me- I just wanted a simple music player and library organizer.

mgerardco