Album Listing Enhancement

[TanagerMusic 0]

I find that when listing by 'Album' for some albums I get multiple listings for an album instead of one listing and this appears to be because Emby is sub-sorting on the 'Album Artist'  after sorting on the 'Album'.

Would it be possible to add an option to sort strictly on the album title?

[Luke 37060]

Hi, I don't quite understand. Can you please show us an example? Thanks.

[TanagerMusic 0]

Here's an example.

The album is Overtures and Preludes and Artist=Richard Wagner. These two definitions are the same for the full album, however the Album Artist has some variations.  In the screen print the tags which have that crossed equal symbol vary between the songs in the album. This was a two-disk set so there are two CDDB records but as you can see in the Emby screen print there are multiple lists for this album which is why I assumed there was a sub-sort on Album Artist.

[Luke 37060]

OK in order to have them grouped together, both the album artist and album values need to be consistent for all tracks within the album. So if you make those corrections within your audio files and then run a regular library scan, that should resolve that.

[TanagerMusic 0]

Well, I don't think that is feasible for the way I manage my library.  So an option to sort Albums strictly by the title would not be an easy task then?

[sydlexius 241]

31 minutes ago, TanagerMusic said:

Well, I don't think that is feasible for the way I manage my library.  So an option to sort Albums strictly by the title would not be an easy task then?

The biggest challenges with your suggestion that I can think of are that 1) not all composers/artists/groups are so creative as to avoid choosing the same name as a previous work.  Secondly, in your example of symphonic works, is that sometimes I may wish to have more than one performance of something like Mass in B minor by Bach.  I certainly wouldn't want them jumbled up as a single album!

It would be technically feasible to group albums by MusicBrainz release IDs.  The challenge is that this requires users to make sure their tags include this data.  This can be done without the use of external programs, such as using the "Identify" feature in Emby.  But it's not perfect (you may not know which is the correct release ID, and accompanying album art is not guaranteed).  Further, some people may prefer to use Discogs or some other source of metadata for their albums.

[Happy2Play 8281]

Folder view has no requirements and presents your structure.  But yes all other tabs require tag matching to create item with Album requiring matching Album/AlbumArtist tags to be grouped.  So multiple Album Artists would be Various Artists.

 

[Luke 37060]

2 hours ago, TanagerMusic said:

Well, I don't think that is feasible for the way I manage my library.  So an option to sort Albums strictly by the title would not be an easy task then?

Then what happens if you have two Greatest Hits albums from two different artists?

[TanagerMusic 0]

Thank you for the responses!

I appreciate the challenges of working with the metadata in a way that works as best as possible for everyone. Too bad there isn't a well-defined standard for this.

I like the listings under Folder view and will probably settle on this view.

[TanagerMusic 0]

1 minute ago, Luke said:

Then what happens if you have two Greatest Hits albums from two different artists?

I think then you could differentiate by the disk ID maybe? 

But this would be less common of a problem than all the listings I see in my library for albums with multiple album artists.

[Luke 37060]

18 minutes ago, TanagerMusic said:

Too bad there isn't a well-defined standard for this.

 

Using the combination of album + albumartist to determine uniqueness for albums is pretty common. You'll see a similar behavior in a lot of other music apps. For example, if you import this into windows media player, the album section will show the same thing we do.

[TanagerMusic 0]

47 minutes ago, Luke said:

Using the combination of album + albumartist to determine uniqueness for albums is pretty common. You'll see a similar behavior in a lot of other music apps. For example, if you import this into windows media player, the album section will show the same thing we do.

FWIW, I haven't seen this behavior with any other music apps I have used which is mostly Linux/java based apps. And I stopped using WMP a very, very long time ago. 

In my experience all of these media apps have their pros and cons/joys and frustrations.  There is probably no such thing as perfection in this app space.

[Jägs 72]

Yeah, I ran into this—well, I'm still running into this—when I moved from Subsonic to Emby and it is exactly as @Lukedescribed:  the "album" was different, the "album artist" was different, or both.  The reason you probably have not encountered this before is that those players are using folder-based grouping, as @Happy2Playindicated.

What I've had to do is run everything through Musicbrainz (via Picard) and properly tag everything.  It's a real pain with large collections, but the bonus is that I've been able to deduplicate and free up space.