Album Artist and "The"

[blue_94_trooper]

I've been experimenting with various UPNP servers to use with my new Grace Digital radio. (Previously I used Firefly with a Roku Soundbridge).

I have a pretty large library (~2700 albums, ~32,500 songs). I don't want to see compilation artists or artists for whom I only have a song or two when browsing. I thought I had solved that issue by setting the compilation flag and/or setting the album artist to "Various Artists" for those tracks and then searching by AlbumArtist/Album. However it does not appear that the AlbumArtist sort respects the setting for "The" that is set for artists and albums. So, when looking under Album Artist dozens of artists are found under "T" for "The" rather than the expected location.

Is there a way to get AlbumArtist to use the "The" setting? (similarly can we do something with for the article "A"?)

Or is there another way to have all of the compilation/single-track artists excluded from the Artist sort?

[mville]

Re: Album Artist and "The"

What format are your audio files?

In Asset UPnP Configuration >> Advanced Settings, check the 'The' Artist & Album Handling and Artist Sort Handling options are set correctly.

In Asset UPnP Configuration, did you try Refresh All, after making your tag edits?.

[blue_94_trooper]

Re: Album Artist and "The"

They're almost all MP3's.

Album and Artist "The" handling is set to Smart. It works for artists (e.g. The Beatles under "B") but not for Album Artists (e.g. The Beatles under "T"). These are non-compilation tags and haven't been edited recently.

[mville]

Re: Album Artist and "The"

They're almost all MP3's.

Album and Artist "The" handling is set to Smart. It works for artists (e.g. The Beatles under "B") but not for Album Artists (e.g. The Beatles under "T"). These are non-compilation tags and haven't been edited recently.

Which software tags (and tagged) your mp3 files? What is the exact name of your Album Artist Sort tags i.e. Album Artist Sort or AlbumArtist Sort or AlbumArtistSort etc.?

[blue_94_trooper]

Re: Album Artist and "The"

I have a blend of things that were tagged in iTunes and things that have been retagged in MP3Tag. As a test I changed the Album Artist in MP3Tag (%albumartist%) of a few Beach Boys records in MP3Tag so I would know that they weren't all iTunes. Now after rescanning not only are the album artists all filed under "The" but so are the artists. In MP3Tag I see artist listed as Value=$meta_sep(artist,\\) and Field=%artist%. I'm doing all my checking in Asset Control.

I'm going to try changing Asset from Smart to value, The and see what happens,

[mville]

Re: Album Artist and "The"

I have a blend of things that were tagged in iTunes and things that have been retagged in MP3Tag. As a test I changed the Album Artist in MP3Tag (%albumartist%) of a few Beach Boys records in MP3Tag so I would know that they weren't all iTunes. Now after rescanning not only are the album artists all filed under "The" but so are the artists. In MP3Tag I see artist listed as Value=$meta_sep(artist,\\) and Field=%artist%. I'm doing all my checking in Asset Control.

In MP3Tag, apart from setting the Artist and Album Artist tags to:
The Beach Boys

are you also setting the respective Artist and Album Artist sort tags to:
Beach Boys, The?

All my flac and mp3 files have the respective sort tags populated, e.g. Artist Sort, Album Artist Sort, Composer Sort, Conductor Sort, Soloists Sort, Album Sort etc., to avoid sort issues.

If you are not populating sort tags, I am unsure how to fix the issue you describe. Hopefully, other users on the forums, who do not use sort tags, can advise you here.

[blue_94_trooper]

Re: Album Artist and "The"

I'm familiar with the sort tags but have never done anything with them in the past. Everything is (or at least was) working fine in the Artist sort, it's just the album artist sort that is not behaving correctly with the "The".

[blue_94_trooper]

Re: Album Artist and "The"

Thanks for your help. I can't explain what happened. It seems that every re-scan made things worse. The first thing I noticed was the mishandling of "the" in the Album Artist sort. Then as I noted in my 6:09PM (EDT) post the same thing subsequently happened in the Artist sort. Later a scan found no albums and I was concerned I had corruption in my files or on my NAS. Yet another scan and now everything seems right, including my original issue with Album Artists which led me to believe that the setting for 'The' Artist & Album Handling was literally just for those two fields.

Can't explain it and unless I see it again, I'm not going to worry about it.