Asset 6.x Obscure bug in Album Artist Scanner

[Grenadier_45]

Hi - I have observed that a few random Album Artists appear in completely the wrong place (under V!) in the tree under 6.x but were correct under 5.1.

My tree is very simple:

Root
|
- Album Artist / Album (A-Z and No Track Listing both ticked)
|
- Album (Neither ticked)
|
- Dynamic Browsing (All Defaults)
|
- Additional (All Defaults)

I run Asset as a service if that helps, and almost the entire library (1728 albums) is FLAC files, tagged from CD using dBPoweramp.

If I delete "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\AppData\ Roaming\dBpoweramp\uMediaLibrary", reinstall 5.1 and re-scan, everything is back to as it should be.
After so doing, if I then install 6.1 or 6.2 over the top, without pressing 'Refresh All', the tree still displays correctly.

If I then ask 6.x to 'Refresh All' several Album Artist are then once again in the wrong place, and in some cases duplicated.
The screenshot is of Linn Kazoo, but BubbleDS Next shows the same structure.

I tried picking on Herbie Hancock and, using dBPoweramp, removing all the tags, converting to WAV, converting back to FLAC, and re-tagging, then performing a full refresh. The result was Herbie still under V. If I change the Album Artist tag to AAA, it then appears under A, as it should.

Any help on how to get to the bottom of this would be much appreciated.

[Spoon]

Re: Asset 6.x Obscure bug in Album Artist Scanner

It is likely you have an 'album artist sort' set in one of the album artists files. You can set asset to never use the sort values on the configuration page.

[Grenadier_45]

Re: Asset 6.x Obscure bug in Album Artist Scanner

Many thanks for the suggestion, but I don't typically use the sort tags (though I probably should now that more things support them). That's all the files in the main Herbie Hancock folder as shown in the ID-Tag editor, so it's not those causing the issue if it is down to Album Artist sorting.

To be thorough, though, I set "Sorting Tag Handling" to "Ignore Sort Values", and that indeed does appear to fix the problem under Asset 6.2, albeit perhaps by hiding the underlying issue.

Why would Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, and the other misplaced items end up under V, as opposed to some other letter, though? And why would setting Album Artist to 'AAA' override the behaviour and cause the albums to show correctly, as tagged, under AAA?

To add to the mystery, I have a second instance of Asset for my lesser played items (which is why I wanted to upgrade to 6.x in the first place), and if I copy the entire Herbie Hancock folder under that folder structure, it all turns up in the expected place. It's almost as if it's something else in the main library, other than these files, breaking the expected indexing somehow.

I tried exporting the database to see if there was anything peculiar in a Sort field on any file, but there doesn't appear to be one in the exported data - am I missing a trick here?

Any further thoughts, or things to try, would be very welcome, as I would eventually like to make use of the sorting tags.

[Spoon]

Re: Asset 6.x Obscure bug in Album Artist Scanner

Install PerfectTUNES this will show sort values based on Artist or Album artist, you will have one set somewhere.

[Grenadier_45]

Re: Asset 6.x Obscure bug in Album Artist Scanner

OK - I already had a copy of Perfect Tunes installed (3.2), so I've let it update its cache and removed all Album Artist and Artist sort tags, not that, as mentioned above, there were many set. So, with no sort tags set anywhere in the library, I "Refreshed All".

Now if I choose either of the options "Display in Sort and Non-Sort Locations" or "Use Sort to Order Display", the same Album Artists still turn up in the wrong place, so it seems not to be anything to do with the sort or Album Artist tags.

Also, if I use Perfect Tunes to browse by metadata, either with sort , or without it , Perfect Tunes shows what I'd expect (and the same as 5.1 shows) under V, whereas Asset 6.2 is feeding Kazoo this: .

If I uninstall 6.2, reinstall 5.1, and let it use the "Display in Sort and Non-Sort Locations", it works as expected. Also 5.1 arrives at a different album count to 6.2. 1847 for 5.1 vs 1728 for 6.2, but both count the same 22992 tracks.

This really does feel like some sort of a bug in the 6.x database scanner at this point, especially since it runs correctly with the 5.1 DB until a "Refresh All" is forced, but I'm happy to test any other reasonable suggestions.

[Spoon]

Re: Asset 6.x Obscure bug in Album Artist Scanner

Try Asset R7 which is in the beta section of this forum.

[Grenadier_45]

Re: Asset 6.x Obscure bug in Album Artist Scanner

The bad news: Asset 7 Beta 3 appears to behave like 6.x not like 5.x or Perfect Tunes.

The good news is that I think the cause has become clearer. Some experimentation has identified an old compilation as a set of tracks which seem to upset the scanner. For some reason, it seems to use the fact that identically titled (but differently Album Artist) tracks exist elsewhere in the library to pull the entire other Album Artist under V when Album Artist sort is set. So the Album Artist sort for these tracks somehow is sticking to other tracks and albums tagged with a different Album Artist. Presumably V because the sort is Various Artists