PT Art treats one album as 3

[BillG]

PerfectTunes Album Art (unregistered downloaded today) reported a single album as 3 albums apparently based on the artist tags.
Each album has a dedicated folder, and all tracks in the folder have identical Album tags. Did I overlook a setting?

[simbun]

Re: PT Art treats one album as 3

I know AssetUPnP has the option 'Album Defined by Folder' but the vast majority of tools define albums using Album and AlbumArtist (alternatively some use the compilation tag).
What values do you have in these tags?

[Spoon]

Re: PT Art treats one album as 3

To group an album together, you would either need an album artist set to the same value for all the tracks, if a compilation album then set the compilation tag to 1

[BillG]

Re: PT Art treats one album as 3

Album has 6 tracks, and is a compilation with 3 different combinations of artists, so PT considers them 3 separate albums as you would expect based on artist. Compilation tag for all tracks is set to 1; not my doing because I was unaware of that tag before simbun mentioned it. I spot-checked other tracks in the library which aren't compilations, and they are set to 1. These go back to 2005, so maybe that came from whatever metadata providers EAC was using.

[BillG]

Re: PT Art treats one album as 3

I'm not clear on how PT is using the Compilation tag. The logic I would expect is: If Compilation, then group by Album Title. but that doesn't seem to be what it's doing.

[simbun]

Re: PT Art treats one album as 3

I'm not clear on how PT is using the Compilation tag. The logic I would expect is: If Compilation, then group by Album Title. but that doesn't seem to be what it's doing.

I copied 6 tracks from different albums into a new folder, wiped all the tags then added:

Album: Album1
Artist: Artist1 (Tracks 1-2), Artist2 (Tracks 3-4), Artist3 (Tracks 5-6)
Compilation: 1
TrackNumber: 1-6

I then copied and pasted those tracks into the same folder and changed their Album tag to Album2, and PerfectTunes grouped the albums correctly.

I then removed the Compilation tag from Album2, ran it back through PerfectTunes and it split Album2 by Artist, so it seems to be working properly.

I did this with FLAC, what format are your files in? Does it work if you replicate the above test?

[BillG]

Re: PT Art treats one album as 3

I was mistaken; I didn't have any Compilation tags set.

MP3tag has two panes: a list of tracks in a specified folder, and an edit pane for the selected track(s). Neither pane shows Compilation by default, so yesterday I added it to the track list pane. For every track in every folder I tried -- maybe 20 folders -- Compilation was 1.

Today I added Compilation to the edit panel so I could try your experiment. The edit panel reported all Compilation tags as empty while the track list still showed all 1s.

I would not have discovered this were it not for your suggested experiment, so I really appreciate your advice and patience. Once that flag was properly set, my problem album behaved as expected.

[simbun]

Re: PT Art treats one album as 3

I would not have discovered this were it not for your suggested experiment, so I really appreciate your advice and patience. Once that flag was properly set, my problem album behaved as expected.

Glad you got it sorted.

Personally I prefer to set AlbumArtist to 'Various Artists' for my compilations as it tends to be a more compatible approach (as every media server at the very least needs to work with AlbumArtist), but as long as your approach works for your setup there's no need to change, and it's a little less duplication.