Help With Organization

[bluepoet]

So I have run into a problem and I not sure how to handle it.  I have Googled what I could find and tried those suggestions with no luck. Here is what I am running into and hopefully someone can offer some help.

I have started to copy my CD's into MusicBee as a .flac file.  When I go into musicbee and look at my music, if a song is feat with someone or written by someone it shows up as another album under the artist which is driving me crazy.  I could probably go in and manually redo all the tags to clean things up.  But there has to be a better way.

I tried to do a virtual tag but that didn't seem to do anything.  I also tried MusicBrainz Picard to redo the tags but that just made things worse because it saved the file as an MP3 extension and then MusicBee didn't like it anymore. 

Just trying to find a way when I view my music.. its under my main artist and not all of these extensions..

IE:
Lets say I have a song: Gretta Jones feat John Doe, Lost My Mind (Album), Stuck In Limbo (Song)

Instead of having another album with the artist Gretta Jones feat John Doe - just want it to be Gretta Jones. 

Hope this makes sense.  If you need more info, i'll give you what I can.  Thanks in advance.
 

[sveakul]

Welcome to the forum!  It would help if you were a little clearer on what you have been doing:

1.  Are you ripping CDs with MusicBee into separate or single FLAC file(s); or moving them into your library from another location?  If the former, how do you have the file naming options set?

2.  Have you set MusicBee to "auto-organize" your library?

3.  How are your tag handling options set in "Tags(2)"

Etc.  If you can give more details, and maybe describe each step you are taking with a single example (illustrate if you want : https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=16499.0), there is bound to be someone here expert at internal tagging/organizing who will be able to help you.

[frankz]

Everybody handles these issues in their own way according to their own tastes on what they want to wind up seeing in the interface.

What I do is this:
Title: The Title (feat. Guest Artist)
Display Artist: Main Artist
Artists: Main Artist; Guest Artist; Another Musician
Album: Album Name
Album Artist: Artist as listed on CD spine

This way, the song will show up in the browser for each of the listed performers, which is what I want. If I look at Eric Clapton's artist listing, I want Blind Faith and Yardbirds and Cream stuff in there. If I'm browsing John Doe, as your example, I would find it useful to see that his career included singing on the Gretta Jones track.

If I don't want to see that detail, I browse by album artist.

My rule is to enter as much valid info as I can on the data entry end and then filter it out as needed on the viewing end. It's easy to avoid information you have but don't want, but it's impossible to find information you don't have.

[bluepoet]

Posted by: sveakul
« on: Today at 03:31:42 AM » Insert Quote
Welcome to the forum!  It would help if you were a little clearer on what you have been doing:

1.  Are you ripping CDs with MusicBee into separate or single FLAC file(s); or moving them into your library from another location?  If the former, how do you have the file naming options set?

Ripping from the CD in MusicBee into seperate FLAC files.  When they go in the folder its Artist name, CD title, track number - song. 

2.  Have you set MusicBee to "auto-organize" your library?

I have not set the auto-organize - been afraid to see what it would do.

3.  How are your tag handling options set in "Tags(2)"

Tag 2 is set for the defaults.  Haven't changed anything in there.

--------------

Posted by: frankz
« on: Today at 04:03:39 AM » Insert Quote
Everybody handles these issues in their own way according to their own tastes on what they want to wind up seeing in the interface.

What I do is this:
Title: The Title (feat. Guest Artist)
Display Artist: Main Artist
Artists: Main Artist; Guest Artist; Another Musician
Album: Album Name
Album Artist: Artist as listed on CD spine

Frankz - this sounds like what I want.  When I do an artist view I get 20 listings for a single artist.  If I go into Album Artist, it makes the main list one name but then I when I go into the artist name. For a single CD it shows it 12 times if there is 12 songs for that single artist, instead of all 12 songs under the one CD title. 

Hope this helps.  Thanks
Blue

[frankz]

Frankz - this sounds like what I want.  When I do an artist view I get 20 listings for a single artist.  If I go into Album Artist, it makes the main list one name but then I when I go into the artist name. For a single CD it shows it 12 times if there is 12 songs for that single artist, instead of all 12 songs under the one CD title. 

Hope this helps.  Thanks
Blue

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're describing.  Screenshots of what you're seeing would help us diagnose what's going on.

[bluepoet]

Was trying to figure out how to share an image.  Think I got it figured out.

Here is a copy of the Artist View where you can see it shows the artist all over.

https://imgur.com/ONTSXqS


Here it is by album artist which is the view for the artist I want but now the albums are showing each track as its own album instead of as one single album.

https://imgur.com/a/UZPoC



Hoping the images show correctly.  I thought it may be a tagging issue which is why I tried to use Picard but it changes the file naming to MP3 which cases issues and I haven't figured out how to change picard to leave the name as a FLAC file.  Maybe I need to turn on the organization in MusicBee and rip to one folder and move it to another.

[frankz]

The first image didn't make it.

Without seeing the actual tags, I have no idea why this is happening.  

You can set picard not to rename files at all.  Take the check mark off of Rename in the options menu.  It doesn't change your extensions at all ever, so I don't know what you're doing there.  It would have no reason to.  

Select all the files in a proper album.  Right Click->Edit.  Make sure the album doesn't say "Mixed." If it does, correct it.  Make sure "Album Artist" doesn't say "Mixed."  If it does, correct it.  

Edit->Preferences->Sorting/Grouping and make sure you don't have something odd set there.  Default is Album Artist + Album Name.  You should stick with the default.

Long story short is your albums aren't tagged to be properly seen as an album according to what you've set an album to be defined as.  Correct the tags and simplify the definition of an album if needed and start from there.

Other than that, it's impossible to know what's happening without more information.

EDIT: Now that you've got the first image working I can see that you likely have an album defined as Artist + Album Name, not Album Artist + Album Name OR have not tagged Album Artist at all (in which case MB defaults to using "Artist" as "Album Artist").  Correcting that would solve half the problem.  Following my previous suggestion regarding tagging Artists would solve the rest of the problem.  

Those Artist tags are a mess IMO.  List those files and select the first one.  Right Click->Edit.  Hit the [...] next to "Artist" and then the "Split" button.  This will, fairly reliably, put each artist in it's own field.  Display Artist can be whatever you want, it doesn't matter, but make sure there's only one person's name on each line below with whatever definition you want in the right column next to him/her.  Click "Update".  Right arrow at the bottom left of the screen to move onto the next file.  Repeat.

[bluepoet]

The first image is when I switched to Artist view and that was all messed up.  The second was under Album Artist view but then the albums only have one track in at a time.  I'll try messing with the Picard more - see if I have something odd in there.  I'll also check my sorting / grouping options and see if anything has changed there.  Should be default but anything could have happened.   I'll also see if I can do what you suggest as well to see if I can get it working.  Thanks for the help.

[frankz]

Forget Picard for now and start simple.  Make sure all of your albums are tagged with the same album name and album artist and make sure the grouping is just album artist + album name.  That will solve the problem on the Album Artist screen.

You will need to correct your Artist tags to solve the problem on the Artist screen.

MB is only reading/displaying what you've entered as the information for these tracks.  To get a correct display, you will need correct information in a proper format.

[bluepoet]

So I went to one of my albums.  I right clicked on it and did edit and it was set for mixed.  So I did Auto Tag by Album and had it correct the tags for that album.  Which it took off the mixed and made it correct.  I then went back to Album Artist view and its still showing an album for each track.  If I change the view to Album, it shows the artist and everything like it should.  For now i'll leave it in album view.  I'll backup what I have in place so far and then see if there is a way to fix the tags of things.  And then i'll go from there.  Will the Auto Organize fix the tags automatically for files?  If so, maybe i'll back things up, turn it on and see what happens.

[frankz]

Don't auto-anything until you manually fix your tags.  Like typing - with your fingers. 

Select all the files in a proper album.  Right Click->Edit.  Make sure the album doesn't say "Mixed." If it does, correct it.  Make sure "Album Artist" doesn't say "Mixed."  If it does, correct it. 

Stop using automatic tools until this is sorted.  Just list your library in tracks view, sort by Album, select one album that's not displaying properly and fix it.  Then move on to the next.

If the album you looked at was properly tagged with a uniform album name and a uniform album artist across all of the tracks, it would be grouped together in the interface.  The fact that it isn't means that it's not properly tagged.

Auto-Organize will move your files around based on the incorrect tags you've put in them!  That's not going to help anyone at this point.

I then went back to Album Artist view and its still showing an album for each track.

It's not "showing an album for each track" it's showing that each of those album artists have one track on that album, because it's still not tagged properly.  All tracks on a Michael W. Smith album should be tagged with Michael W. Smith - alone - as the album artist, because he is, regardless of who else is singing or performing on that individual track.  It's his album, he's the album artist across all of the tracks.