Albums erroneously labelled as "Various Artists"

[mll0]

Even if a release's ARTIST tag is linked, for every track, to a single artist, AND there is no COMPILATION tag AND the ALBUM ARTIST tag is set to the single artist, LMS attributes the release to "Various Artists" WHEN the tracks bear EITHER the MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID OR MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID tags.

Here's a screenshot of a the results of tests I did. I hope it's self-explanatory, if not all the details are there:

LMS version is Version: 8.5.2 - 1713971774

Edit On the forum, we probably found the cause: elsewewhere within the directories scanned by LMS, there is at least one file from the same artist whose tag ALBUMARTIST I changed to "Various artists" while leaving MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID and MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID. This leads LMS to think that the MB ID found under MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID of Pink Floyd is in fact Various Artists, as proven by this library.db extract:

id        name               namesort      namesearch         musicbrainz_id
190820    Various Artists    PINK FLOYD    VARIOUS ARTISTS        83d91898-7763-47d7-b03b-b92132375c47

``` Does LMS' behaviour serve some purpose, or could this be considered a bug?

[SteveFosdick]

Are you saying the issue is that LMS uses the MusicBrainz MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID and MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID tags in preference to the ordinary ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags?

Do these tags need to have different GUIDs for the album to be classified as "Various Artists"?

One possible issue here is that MusicBrainz has the concept of merging. That means using a MusicBrainz tag value (GUID) may seem like it would side-step issues of inconsistent spelling (especially of artists) but anything in MusicBrainz (release, recording, work, person etc.) can have two GUIDs assigned to two different variants of the same thing, then someone realises and merges them. That means there are then two GUIDs that are equivalent but, without the MusicBrainz database, there is no way to tell. Maybe there is an API call to MusicBrainz to help?

As a work-around for someone experiencing this, updating tagged files with Picard or similar may help. When merging, one of the previous two entities becomes the master and I would hope Picard would re-write the tags to use only the master GUID.

[mll0]

Hi @SteveFosdick . No, the GUID is consistent. On the forum discussion I think we found the cause for this problem, and I edited my OP here to clarify.

[986ster]

I've noticed this issue on DSF files, but not on FLAC files. I have the same album in FLAC and DSD formats, and the DSD one shows up under Various Artists whereas the FLAC one doesn't. In both cases they have ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags on every track, and no COMPILATION tags. One track has a different ARTIST tag than the others because there is a featured artist, and this seems to be tripping up the scanner for DSF files into thinking it's a compilation.

[michaelherger]

I think we concluded it was a tagging issue, right? A self-created "album" of tracks by various artists which caused the confusion, right?

[986ster]

It may well be. In my case it was the stupid TPE2 tag and how it's mapped by default to Band, which I've never had to worry about before becuase I hadn't used ID3 tags until I started getting DSF tracks.

[mll0]

I think we concluded it was a tagging issue, right? A self-created "album" of tracks by various artists which caused the confusion, right?

Well, for me it's not clear if this behaviour is desired or not. I'm still waiting for your answer to my question there to know if we should close this issue or not. :)

[michaelherger]

Well, you can't rely on MB IDs "sometimes", but have them ignored most of the time. Either use them or don't. It's really a tagging issue, not a LMS scanning issue. Use playlists instead of self-made pseudo albums, as slarti suggested.

[Moonbase59]

In my Picard tagger script I use a logic that has proven good for the past 12 years:

Excerpt:

$noop(<!-- MusicBrainz Picard Tagger script -->)
$noop(<!-- 2019-10-17 Version 0.11 by Moonbase -->)
$noop(<!-- You should have plugin lastfmng enabled and set up -->)
$noop(<!-- This script also works with Picard 2.x/lastfmng 2.x -->)

$noop(<!-- Remove "Various Artists" on compilations – good for Logitech Mediaserver/SqueezeCenter -->)
$noop(<!-- We use the MB albumartistid for identification because there IS an artist called "Various Artists" -Torsten Pröfrock- -->)
$if($and($eq(%compilation%,1),$eq(%musicbrainz_albumartistid%,89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377)),$unset(albumartist) $unset(albumartistsort))

Maybe that can help a little.