Author Topic: Fixed: Some albums display 'Various Artists' when AlbumArtist tag is blank  (Read 2123 times)

fred

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9 albums (out of 17,000) erroneously display AlbumArtist as "Various Artists" when the AlbumArtist tag is blank as can be seen in the screenshot below:




One of the albums (Bonzo Dog/Gorilla) is available here


EDIT by phred: Link removed to avoid DRM iissues.
Last Edit: September 22, 2020, 04:29:56 PM by phred

psychoadept

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Check your sorting/grouping preferences. There is an option to treat blank Album Artist as Various Artists when the iTunes compilation flag is set. That's probably what's happening.
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fred

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I looked at the Sorting options and none were ticked but all the albums had iTunes compilation flag set to 1. Removing this restored everything to normal. As I have never used iTunes I wouldn't have spotted this in a million years!

Many thanks for your prompt and helpful reply- at least everyone can enjoy the Bonzo Dog album (or should I take down the link?) - the track Into & Outro is surrealistically funny

phred

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I have removed the link to the album in order to avoid any DRM issues.
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

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psychoadept

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I looked at the Sorting options and none were ticked but all the albums had iTunes compilation flag set to 1. Removing this restored everything to normal. As I have never used iTunes I wouldn't have spotted this in a million years!


Glad it worked!

If the "treat iTunes compilations as" option wasn't ticked, that shouldn't have been happening, though. If you can document that for sure, it's a bug.

The flag gets set by many taggers, including Picard, partly for compatibility.
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fred

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I added the iTunes compilation tag to a random album and sure enough the album artist changed to "Various Artists" but in the Sorting tab of the Edit Panel nothing is ticked and there is nothing to suggest an iTunes override:



Am I missing something?

frankz

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"Edit->Edit Preferences->Sorting/Grouping...grouping...detect iTunes compilation and treat as Album Artist" should be unchecked if you don't want this.

The "iTunes compilation" denotation is on the "Settings" tab of the edit screen, not the sorting tab.

fred

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Thanks for the info - I've never to my knowledge ever looked at that part of MB. When I did look at it this was what I found:


I tried to change the tick box to no avail - what I had to do was click the other radio button, remove the tick & then click the first radio button to achieve what I wanted. This seems slightly odd to me. The position of the tick box implies that it is only valid for the radio button for which it is indented. If it is a truly global option (which the behaviour I have observed seems to suggest is true) then it should surely be aligned with the radio buttons?