[bug] Music is not grouped by album in Media Player

Question

14

[bug] Music is not grouped by album in Media Player

Tracked by Jolla (In release)

asked 2019-06-18 13:35:21 +0200

jsommer
3324 ●97 ●142 ●154

updated 2020-04-16 14:49:51 +0200

rozgwi
4618 ●49 ●77 ●79

Observed on 3.0.3.10 (Acione P), Sailfish X 3.0.3 + 3.1.0, 3.2.0 (J1), 3.2.1.19. Aqua Fish (3.0.1.11) works as expected

Almost all music titles on the SD card are not grouped by album. I can reproduce after executing tracker reset -r in the terminal app.
It seems, that this bug occurs in all Sailfish OS releases since 3.0.1.11.
Can any one confirm this behaviour? Does someone knows a workaround? It's not a good user experience to navigate back and select another albom for each title.

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4

Confirming for Sailfish X (Xperia X), also 3.0.3.10. each album is displayed multiple times for the number of tracks it contains.
For me it seems as if the problem above all applies to AAC audio files, MP3 is not affected that much.

rozgwi ( 2019-06-18 18:12:28 +0200 )edit

I have latest update on the j1 and it's working flawlessy for me...

247 ( 2019-06-18 18:29:05 +0200 )edit

I have copied the music directory of iTunes. It works fine on my Intex Aqua Fish with Sailfish 3.0.1.11. The files are MPEG-4 audio files with .m4a ending.

jsommer ( 2019-06-18 18:50:39 +0200 )edit

I had the same problem before, at least with Greatest Hits-albums with songs tagged with their individual year. I had as many "albums" as there were songs with unique year-tags. I learned that the year-tag is supposed to be used for the whole album, not individual songs (there is some other tag one can use for that). After deleting all year-tags on every album with songs with different years, everything works great. I'm on Xperia Hossa 3.0.3.10.

Lars Maria ( 2019-06-18 20:38:36 +0200 )edit

2

Confirmed for 3.0.3.10 on XA2+ Music folder symlinked to SD card. Now each song is its own album.

Kopekenscheich ( 2019-06-21 11:23:59 +0200 )edit

Confirming for Sailfish X (Xperia X), also 3.0.3.10. each album is displayed multiple times for the number of tracks it contains.
For me it seems as if the problem above all applies to AAC audio files, MP3 is not affected that much.
rozgwi ( 2019-06-18 18:12:28 +0200 )edit
I have latest update on the j1 and it's working flawlessy for me...
247 ( 2019-06-18 18:29:05 +0200 )edit
I have copied the music directory of iTunes. It works fine on my Intex Aqua Fish with Sailfish 3.0.1.11. The files are MPEG-4 audio files with .m4a ending.
jsommer ( 2019-06-18 18:50:39 +0200 )edit
I had the same problem before, at least with Greatest Hits-albums with songs tagged with their individual year. I had as many "albums" as there were songs with unique year-tags. I learned that the year-tag is supposed to be used for the whole album, not individual songs (there is some other tag one can use for that). After deleting all year-tags on every album with songs with different years, everything works great. I'm on Xperia Hossa 3.0.3.10.
Lars Maria ( 2019-06-18 20:38:36 +0200 )edit
Confirmed for 3.0.3.10 on XA2+ Music folder symlinked to SD card. Now each song is its own album.
Kopekenscheich ( 2019-06-21 11:23:59 +0200 )edit

Answer 1

3

answered 2019-11-14 14:58:15 +0200

Andy Branson

4998 ●64 ●98 ●87

Inside Tracker, the album name and album artist name are used along with the release date to generate the album identifier. The date is a fairly recent addition to try to avoid album mixing, see the discussion here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=773697

We haven't updated tracker in a long time, because they removed support for album art so we'll have to find an alternative solution for that. If you noticed a change in indexing between versions, then that could be because some particular tracks weren't reindexed in a long time, and became separated when that happened. The album ordering by date doesn't affect this - that's just for displaying each artist's album covers in the correct order of release, and only on the artist album page.

However, there could be extraction bugs at work here too with certain file formats and unusual tag types, so it'd help to see what's going on in each case if you could query tracker for the album information it has extracted from your tracks. You can do this in the terminal with this command:

tracker extract <filename>

Towards the end of the output, you should see a 'nmm:musicAlbum' field that contains an encoded string. That's what we use to identify the album, so test a couple on each side of your split and see what the difference is. I had a quick look at my collection and for three split albums, two were rogue date fields and the other was differing album artist tags.

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Thanks Andy that shines some light on the problem. "tracker extract" is showing the same date but slightly different times on each of the problem tracks.

I've discovered that (based on all the files I've checked so far) my really old albums ripped to mp3 are OK. The ones newer than that ripped to m4a using iTunes all appear as individual albums one track long. The newest ones I've ripped to mp3 with k3b are OK - all tracks in one album.

Looking at the tags in kid3 on my desktop, the mp3 files have both ID3v1 and v2 tags. The m4a files have v2 tags only.

So is the problem that tracker can't handle v2-only tagged files??? It used to be able to.

tux_in_iE ( 2019-11-21 22:28:47 +0200 )edit

Very interesting. Thanks for investigation. Maybe a script to modify the metadata of the m4a files in a batch process could help.

jsommer ( 2019-11-22 12:38:06 +0200 )edit

There should be a simple fix for this in tracker, as it worked before. I'm not actually sure if m4a files support ID3v1 tags, I'm still researching this.

tux_in_iE ( 2019-11-22 22:17:28 +0200 )edit

Can you give me the nmm:musicAlbum fields for these m4a tracks?

Andy Branson ( 2019-11-25 17:59:58 +0200 )edit

How can I get these fields?

jsommer ( 2019-11-25 19:10:56 +0200 )edit

Answer 2

0

answered 2020-04-03 06:41:58 +0200

Kopekenscheich

758 ●6 ●19 ●26

Still present in 3.3.0.14.

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1

Makes me want to quote a line of Billie Eilish:

duh

And gives me the same feeling that makes Homer go:

doh!

rozgwi ( 2020-04-04 00:02:18 +0200 )edit

1

Jokes aside. @Andy Branson, you don't by chance have any news for us on this matter?

rozgwi ( 2020-04-04 00:08:48 +0200 )edit

Answer 3

-1

answered 2019-11-12 15:41:31 +0200

Kim

2071 ●41 ●61 ●67

http://www.kimfoder.dk/

I'm afraid this is no bug but a feature, requested by a user.

We had a discussion in 2018, after the launch of 2.1.4.14, about it and even though I had to accept it was a fulfilled wish, I'm still very unhappy about it.

See the original discussion here

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1

Well, then it‘s a detestable feature in my opinion.

Kopekenscheich ( 2019-11-12 18:00:40 +0200 )edit

1

Judging by the changelog entry mentioned in that question the behavior described here remains a bug.
Even if albums are sorted by date instead of alphabetical order individual tracks should still be grouped by album. The problem in the other question was different year tags for podcast episodes of the same album.
For my case at least the affected tracks all have the same album and year tag.

rozgwi ( 2019-11-12 21:02:37 +0200 )edit

1

Hi, for me it is also a bug. I open album view in the Media player and I have 20 times the same album with one song every time. That is not correct. Interestingly, after update to Sailfish 3.2, some new albums got 'split'. I was trying to edit mp3 tags (using easytag), to fix the problem but it did not work. Is there any workaround that problem? Other than that Media Player works well for me.

Marius ( 2019-11-14 11:48:15 +0200 )edit

@Marius check out my comment in the original post above, there seem to be multiple factors that cause the multiple albums symptom. My post is about certain non-alpha characters like apostrophes in filenames that cause it, which seems fairly ridiculous, and should be fixed.

Just wanted to mention it in case it helps. It started a few versions back for me .

Drekkie ( 2019-11-14 21:11:52 +0200 )edit

Need to give this post a bump. Will there be a switch in Settings or even Music Player to revert tracker to original file sorting? Failing that could Jolla or a dev create a script which removes the uncommon values in the tag, by folder? ie. keep the album name. Or is the album name stored elsewhere and can be called on differently? This 'bug' affects all music players. Has anyone used a tag editor to good effect to resolve this issue? Thanks.

rmitchell ( 2020-02-25 03:26:59 +0200 )edit

[bug] Music is not grouped by album in Media Player

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