How to disable automatic Album Artist tagging?

[mikeMikey]

Help, I'm new to MusicBee and I ran into a problem that I am trying to solve for the past hour or so, basically, with some of my songs that I downloaded have a dash in their name, but it's not to signify the album artist but rather some other reason. But the problem is that MusicBee recognizes it as an album artist and automatically turns it into an album. So for example lets say that I have a song named "Song - Name", now when I import it into MusicBee it thinks that "Song" is a album artist, and then it assigns it as a seperate album, like this . Please help, I have been trying to solve this for an hour! Thanks in advance, and If I didn't explain my problem correctly please tell me

[psychoadept]

Hi, welcome to the forum!

Have you checked the actual tags in the file with the tag inspector (open tag editor > tag inspector is at the top)? I am not aware of MusicBee changing any tags based on a dash. The only character that it automatically processes is a semi colon for multi-value tags, and even then you have to at least rescan the file to trigger it.

[phred]

Tags. It's all about the tags. MB is mainly a music manager. If your music isn't tagged, or isn't tagged correctly, you'll have issues like the one you're experiencing.

I suggest you take a look at the Wiki. Search for and read 'the anatomy of musicbee' and then search for and read 'tagging.' Neither may be up to date with the latest version, but it sounds like you need a basic introduction and the Wiki will help with that.

[mikeMikey]

To psychoadept

First of all, thanks for welcoming me to the forums, I appreciate it  , Anyway, when I check the tag inspector this is what comes up



It looks like in the tag inspector it doesn't show much but in the tag editor, it shows that the artist is "Song" keep in mind I didn't alter this, when I imported it this is how it was.

To phred

Oh, well, the problem is that most of my music isn't tagged, but to be honest I'm probably not going to use fancy features like albums and stuff like that, so I think that the music not being tagged won't be that much of an issue for me, it's just that I'm trying to fix this problem. And also thanks for letting me know about The Anatomy Of Musicbee page, I will look into it when I have the time

[phred]

I would think you'll need at least the track title and artist name tags in order to find enjoy your music. Have no tags at all will make it difficult to find the music you want to listen to.

Where the artist is 'Song' is the a track/album that you ripped from a CD? Or might it be from some download site that's not quite legitimate? I'm not judging. I'm asking because if you got them from the latter, whoever uploaded them may have tagged them in the way you're seeing.

[psychoadept]

I agree with phred, a complete lack of tags is going to cause you more headaches than just getting the files tagged correctly. You don't have to do anything complicated, but MusicBee can help identify your tracks using the sound signature, or if you have track info in the filename you can use the "infer and update tags from file names" command.

[mikeMikey]

Ah okay then, well, thanks guys for the help, When I have the time I will probably go through the songs I have and tag them, luckily I don't have too too much songs, and based on what you guys have said it will help me in the long run.

Also phred, It isn't from a CD, it's more along the lines of downloading directly from youtube (but most of them are stuff like video game music), so that could be it, but the strange thing is if for example, I rename the file to "Song2 - Name2" it will import it with a album artist called Song2 and a track called Name2, so I dunno what could it be.

[psychoadept]

It may actually be that MusicBee is trying to interpolate tags from the file name, since it has nothing else to go on at all. I'm not sure; a complete lack of tags is an unusual situation.