Missing albums/tracks (Windows vs Raspberry) and strange multidisc display

[dvdr]

Hi
I have two instances of Asset UPnP running - both just downloaded and installed, latest premium version.
One resides on a Raspberry Pi (latest OS version, Asset 7.5), one as a service on a windows computer (Asset 7.4). My music collection is synchronized between the two computers: it's identical - as are all options in Asset's settings.

Still, Asset's Windows computer title and album count show a way higher count of titles and albums than Asset's Raspberry version. How comes?

Second observation: no matter what control point / renderer I use, the title display of multidisc albums seems strange to me.
First disc has just track numbers, second disc has a leading 101/102 etc.
Shouldn't it be 101/102... for the first disc and 201/202... for the second disc? I tried different options in Assets configuration (both for multidisc and for title display), but this strange numbering scheme basically stays the same: the second disc is the one with the "1" reference, third disc gets a "2" etc. (see attached screenshot of mconnect - the same results I will get with Linn Kazoo on my Mac or the latest Linn app on my iPhone).
I had noticed that behaviour already with the 6.x versions, so I decided to update to 7.x and doing a completely fresh install (Raspberry Pi was a complete fresh setup of the OS, on Windows, I deinstalled Asset and made sure to clean all traces down to the configuration folders deep down in the system).

When tagging multidisc-albums (mp3Tag) I follow these rules: album title is identical for all discs, no (disc X) or any other naming scheme are used for the album title. Disc number is just a single number, starting with one digit 1, 2 ...10, 11. There is no 1/5, 2/5... counting scheme in my disc number tag.

Any help in the matter is most appreciated.

Bildschirmfoto 2023-02-18 um 11.49.02.jpg

[Spoon]

WMA files? only the windows version will show them.

[dvdr]

WMA files? only the windows version will show them.

No WMA files, just flac, mp3, wav, dsf, alac and some m4a

[Spoon]

You would have to track do some missing items and see if there is something common between them.

[garym]

rPi is I believe using a linux based OS. Some file and folder naming differences exist. Can't recall what they are, but things like having "." in front of file name or folder name and other sorts of characters in name can be an issue.

[dvdr]

You would have to track do some missing items and see if there is something common between them.

Thanks - found some corrupted files on the second disc, deleted them and did a rescan. Still a few missing, I'll investigate further. Thanks!

As for the multi-disc display question, I ran into another issue and kindly ask for advice. I tried for hours, but did not find a solution.

It's about the combination of the options "Album Defined by Folder" and "Multi disc".

- all my multi discs do have a discnumber tag
- the older CD-rips are in a folder-structure Album Artist/Album/CD1, CD2, CD3.../discnumber-tracknumber-title.file-extension
- the newer CD-rips and download purchases all share just one common folder, no dinstinction between CD1, CD2 etc.: Album Artist/Album/discnumber-tracknumber-title.file-extension
- If I have multiple copies of a multi disc (for example a CD Rip and a downloaded purchase), their album title is the same, they just get a different tag named "source"

Problem is, that whatever combination of "...defined by folder" and "Multi disc" I use, I will run into problems.

- "NOT defined by folder" will merge multiple versions of the same album into one single album, with multiple instances of "track 1" next to each other
- "DEFINED by folder" will split the CD1, CD2... rips into a display of as many albums as there were CDs
- that combined with the "multi disc" options "Leave Album Tag untouched" and "Combine Multi Disc Albums as one" (plus the additional "auto"-setting of the Raspberry version) creates different display results, that always run into some unwanted display or distinction between multi-disc albums.
- "Leave Album tag untouched" and "Defined by folder" is bad for CD1, CD2, CD3 versions
- "Combine as one" and "not defined by folder" will combine different versions of one album from different locations.
etc...

Is there any way out of this before I need to manually re-sort my huge collection? I thought, painstakingly tagging them would be enough.
Thanks again for you help!

[dvdr]

You would have to track do some missing items and see if there is something common between them.

Found one thing, that explains many of the missing albums: they all are mp3 tracks. I usually tag them with mp3tag, so I closely looked at the details of these files.
ALL the ones that were not displayed in the album artist\album tree had the tag ALBUMARTIST but not ALBUM ARTIST. When I added ALBUM ARTIST, they reappeared. I had never noticed that before, since in the big editor window of mp3tag, I saw a value for album artists, so I did not bother.
This only happened with mp3 files, on all my FLAC files, Asset UPnP did not have an issue with ALBUMARTIST - maybe indexing both tag values and just looking for either of both. Does Asset UPnP treat MP3-files differently?

[simbun]

It's about the combination of the options "Album Defined by Folder" and "Multi disc".

- all my multi discs do have a discnumber tag
- the older CD-rips are in a folder-structure Album Artist/Album/CD1, CD2, CD3.../discnumber-tracknumber-title.file-extension
- the newer CD-rips and download purchases all share just one common folder, no dinstinction between CD1, CD2 etc.: Album Artist/Album/discnumber-tracknumber-title.file-extension
- If I have multiple copies of a multi disc (for example a CD Rip and a downloaded purchase), their album title is the same, they just get a different tag named "source"

Problem is, that whatever combination of "...defined by folder" and "Multi disc" I use, I will run into problems.

"Album defined by folder" tells dBpoweramp how to identify an album from your files/folders. By default it will merge across folders, if you select this option it won't.
The "Multi disc" option tells dBpoweramp how to present the albums to the control point, so they're two unrelated settings.

I don't believe there's a solution to having a combination of folder defined AND tag defined, you'll need to pick a standard.

Regarding the odd naming of tracks when displaying disc numbers, I think that's just the way it is and was discussed here most recently.

I didn't have much luck with the title settings either, so there's a little to be desired, maybe it just needs better documentation:

• [track *] - [title] for album tracks
  Doesn't appear to do anything
• [artist] - [title] for Various Artist album tracks
  Doesn't appear to do anything
• Multi-Disc Albums show Title as '[Disc] [Track] [Title]'
  Instead shows "[Track] [Disc] [Title]" and where [Disc] and [Track] are the same it only shows one!!!

[simbun]

Found one thing, that explains many of the missing albums: they all are mp3 tracks. I usually tag them with mp3tag, so I closely looked at the details of these files.
ALL the ones that were not displayed in the album artist\album tree had the tag ALBUMARTIST but not ALBUM ARTIST. When I added ALBUM ARTIST, they reappeared. I had never noticed that before, since in the big editor window of mp3tag, I saw a value for album artists, so I did not bother.
This only happened with mp3 files, on all my FLAC files, Asset UPnP did not have an issue with ALBUMARTIST - maybe indexing both tag values and just looking for either of both. Does Asset UPnP treat MP3-files differently?

It can be confusing to look at the friendly names given in products, it's always better to look at the source. I believe the standard Album Artist tag in ID3 (for MP3's) is TPE2 and the easiest way to check what tag you have populated is by opening the file in MusicBee and look at the Tag Inspector.

If you're on Linux you could use

hexdump -n700 -C 01.01.mp3

Which would give you something like this, and look for your album artist. In this example it's written to TPE2

00000130  00 67 00 6f 00 6e 00 73  00 00 00 54 50 45 32 00  |.g.o.n.s...TPE2.|
00000140  00 00 23 00 00 01 ff fe  49 00 6d 00 61 00 67 00  |..*.....I.m.a.g.|
00000150  69 00 6e 00 65 00 20 00  44 00 72 00 61 00 67 00  |i.n.e. .D.r.a.g.|
00000160  6f 00 6e 00 73 00 00 00  54 58 58 58 00 00 00 1d  |o.n.s...

My guess is that if you use ALBUMARTIST for FLAC and TPE2 for MP3 then they should both appear.

I tend to use this as my bible for these things, although I'm almost exclusively using Vorbis with FLAC and OGG.

[simbun]

Looking in the Mp3tag documentation it states that TPE2 is mapped to %ALBUMARTIST% and in the GUI it maps %ALBUMARTIST% to - the description - "Album Artist", which agrees with what you were saying.

Properties.jpg


Not sure how the other field was populated initially though, unless you typed %ALBUM ARTIST% in manually.

Can get confusing :-)