Album Name Not Correct in Tag field "TALB" for just some tracks of some albums

[Mauser69]

I was trying to track down why some albums were not displaying with the correct names in my DLNA server, when they looked fine in MusicBee.  What I found was that SOME tracks in an album had a different Album Name shown in the Tag Inspector field TALB than they showed in the main MusicBee edit screen.

For example, in the album 20 Years of Jethro Tull, all tracks correctly displayed that name in the main Edit window, but a few of them showed "20 Years of Jethro Tull Disc 1" in the TALB tag.

To have MusicBee displaying a different album name than is shown in the Tag Inspector seems to be a BIG error to me.

That album was ripped from a CD, but I have no way of knowing how many iterations of field edits it might have gone through since I originally ripped it. 

In trying to fix the problem, I found that if I edited the album name in the main edit window for JUST ONE TRACK, it did change the TALB tag with the new name.  But if I tried to rename multiple tracks at the same time, the main edit window did show the name change, but the TALB tag for each of the tracks was NOT changed.  Sounds like a bug.  I am guessing that maybe this is what caused the problem, since this is a multi-CD set, and I know the disc numbers and album names were changed after the initial rip.

But to have only SOME of the tracks now showing a different album name in the TALB tag seems like a bug, right?  Maybe two bugs:
1)  The displayed album name should always match the value in the album name tag, right?
2)  When changing the album name for multiple tracks, all the tracks should have the tag updated.

Shouldn't ANY change to the album name of a track done within MusicBee cause the TALB tag to be updated also?  I do know for a FACT that I have never updated the tags for this album with any other tool.  Now I am worried about how to audit all of the thousands of albums/tracks I have in my library to try and find other instances of this problem!

[redwing]

if I edited the album name in the main edit window for JUST ONE TRACK, it did change the TALB tag with the new name.  But if I tried to rename multiple tracks at the same time, the main edit window did show the name change, but the TALB tag for each of the tracks was NOT changed.

Which view are you using in the main panel? If you change a view, does it make any differences?

[redwing]

if I edited the album name in the main edit window for JUST ONE TRACK, it did change the TALB tag with the new name.  But if I tried to rename multiple tracks at the same time, the main edit window did show the name change, but the TALB tag for each of the tracks was NOT changed.

I tried what you said in every view but can't replicate the issue. It changes the tag value as expected for all selected tracks even with multiple tracks selected.
Maybe your DLNA server reads and displays a different tag format like ID3v1 tags?
Or even if you have rescanned the files, the server fails, for some reason, to pick up the latest changes?

[Mauser69]

if I edited the album name in the main edit window for JUST ONE TRACK, it did change the TALB tag with the new name.  But if I tried to rename multiple tracks at the same time, the main edit window did show the name change, but the TALB tag for each of the tracks was NOT changed.

I tried what you said in every view but can't replicate the issue. It changes the tag value as expected for all selected tracks even with multiple tracks selected.
Maybe your DLNA server reads and displays a different tag format like ID3v1 tags?
Or even if you have rescanned the files, the server fails, for some reason, to pick up the latest changes?

First of all, this is NOT a DLNA issue - I just discovered it because the DLNA server was displaying what was in the TALB tag, which showed some tracks from the same album as being in two different albums.  That led me to investigate how the tracks were shown in MusicBee.  Now we can totally forget about DLNA, as everything else I saw and did was directly in MusicBee.  The fact that the DLNA server showed two different album names simply verifies that the tag values on the tracks were, in fact, different, despite the fact that MusicBee did not show that.

Unfortunately, I cannot currently duplicate this problem by manually changing tag values, so it does not surprise me that you have not duplicated it either.  If I use Tag Inspector to manually change the TALB tag for a track, then go back to the main Edit screen, that track always shows the new value, but that is specifically what it was NOT doing with this album when I discovered the problem.  There was something strange about that album that made MusicBee not display the actual value that was in TALB for just some of the track.  Let me try to describe it again, being more simplistic:

--  The album was a 3 disc set called "Xyz".
 
--  When I displayed the album in MusicBee, it had the correct name "Xyz", and the tracks for each disc were correctly numbered as 1-n, 2-n and 3-n.  If I used the MusicBee Edit screen to look at each track individually, EVERY ONE OF THEM showed the correct album name of "Xyz".

--  BUT, if I used the Tag Inspector to look at each track individually, tracks 1-6, 1-7 and 1-8 showed tag TALB = "Xyz Disc1".  Ordinarily, that would have caused MusicBee to display those tracks as being in a different album from all the rest, just like the DLNA server was doing, but that is not what it was doing.

--  I closed the Tag Inspector and used the main Edit screen to change the Album Name for just track 1-6.  The Edit screen still showed "Xyz" as the title, so I just deleted the last character, then re-selected "Xyz" from the drop down list presented (note that this was slightly different than actually typing a new album name).  After I saved the Edit, then re-opened the screen and went to the Tag Inspector, it showed that TALB was actually changed to the correct title of just "Xyz".

--  So I then selected both 1-7 and 1-8 together and repeated that step exactly the same way.  But this time, when I checked the tracks with Tag Inspector, neither of them showed an updated Album name - Tag Inspector still showed TALB =  "Xyz Disc1", and the main MusicBee Edit screen still showed each of those tracks with an Album Name of "Xyz".

The unique aspect of the problem that I cannot re-create to set up the test is that those particular tracks had a different value in TALB than MusicBee showed in any display other than Tag Inspector.

The way that I finally fixed all of the bad tracks together was to select them all (including some with the right album name and some with the wrong name), then go into the Tag Inspector, where it showed two different entries for TALB.  I then checked the one with the wrong name and deleted it in the Tag Inspector, and after I saved those changes and went back in to look again, all of those tracks were left with the correct name in TALB.

I do not know if I can find any other albums/tracks in my library with the same problem, but I will certainly let y'all know about it if I do!

[hiccup]

Does your MusicBee library reference to local files, or to files on your Nas?

[redwing]

There can be a delay between what's shown within MB and tag changes actually made to files.
For instance, if you select thousands of tracks and edit a tag, MB immediately shows changed values for all files, but it's still in the middle of saving the changes to files. Also it will take some time for your server to pick up the changes, depending on how it's configured.

[Mauser69]

Does your MusicBee library reference to local files, or to files on your Nas?

MB on this computer is using the files on the NAS.

[Mauser69]

There can be a delay between what's shown within MB and tag changes actually made to files.
For instance, if you select thousands of tracks and edit a tag, MB immediately shows changed values for all files, but it's still in the middle of saving the changes to files. Also it will take some time for your server to pick up the changes, depending on how it's configured.

I can see how that could have made me think that multiple tags were not being updated from the MusicBee edit screen, although all other tests on multiple tracks at the same time were being shown immediately.  And what the DLNA server was picking up after I tried to make changes was totally irrelevant since I was only looking at the data inside the MusicBee application.

But the REAL question seems to remain: "Why did MusicBee show that the track had an Album Name of "XYz" when the TALB tag actually had a value of "Xyz Disc1"?"  This was the case before I made any changes at all.

[hiccup]

I thought so.
Then I am not sure this is a completely reliable statement:

First of all, this is NOT a DLNA issue

I am neither a network nor a DLNA expert, but my suspicions would be targeted at what your server and it's DNLA implementation is doing to your files. Possibly keeping them 'hostage'?

[redwing]

But the REAL question seems to remain: "Why did MusicBee show that the track had an Album Name of "XYz" when the TALB tag actually had a value of "Xyz Disc1"?"  This was the case before I made any changes at all.

Except the temporary delay that I mentioned, I can't think of any case that can happen. If you use album grouping based on album name, such discrepancy will immediately split up displayed albums into multiple ones.

[Mauser69]

But the REAL question seems to remain: "Why did MusicBee show that the track had an Album Name of "XYz" when the TALB tag actually had a value of "Xyz Disc1"?"  This was the case before I made any changes at all.

Except the temporary delay that I mentioned, I can't think of any case that can happen. If you use album grouping based on album name, such discrepancy will immediately split up displayed albums into multiple ones.

Yes, I know that.  And to my knowledge, MB has always done that correctly with my library; I have seen it many times.  But I THOUGHT is was doing that correctly with this album too, until I saw that the DLNA server was actually reading the tag correctly and splitting the album, but MB was NOT.

Now I am kind of split - one one hand, I do not want to have to deal with this strange problem with other albums in my library (and having to compare every single album is going to be a nightmare), but I do want to find another existing example so we might be able to discover the real cause.

[redwing]

For example, in the album 20 Years of Jethro Tull, all tracks correctly displayed that name in the main Edit window, but a few of them showed "20 Years of Jethro Tull Disc 1" in the TALB tag.

If you look at those tracks with tag inspector, do they have tag format other than ID3v2.3?

[Mauser69]

Most of the tracks for this album have a few ID3v1 tags, some of them include a album name in the v1 tags, and others do not.  There is no correlation between the tracks that had the problem and whether or not they had an album name in the v1 tags.

I have completed an initial review of the DLNA albums (just scanning the album art and the titles for all of them, not looking at the tracks), and nothing stands out as having the same problem that this one album did.  I am afraid we are going to have to write this one off as a mystery unless I can find some way to duplicate it manually.

[redwing]

OK. That sounds good.

BTW if you ever encounter another case, I'd suggest you take a look at file modification date for each track before making any edits. That might give you some idea about what's going on.

[Mauser69]

Yeah, if I knew it was going to be a real mystery, I'd have done a number of things differently, but it started out as just some minor maintenance.  

The damn thing is, just an hour or two before I found the problem, I had overwritten an old USB drive that had a full copy of that database.  And only a few days ago I had moved that entire database from an old NAS to the new one - moved instead of copied, so the original files were wiped out.  I wasn't worried about file loss, since I have all the original source files in lossless copies on a different machine, but I could have used either of those other copies of this library to research this more if I still had them.