Albums with the same name are confused when using albumartist and not artist tags to sort library

[doronbehar]

• Vanilla Music Version (Settings -> About): 1.0.54 Released Aug 12, 2017
• Android Version: Lineage OS 14.1-2017-0824-NIGHTLY-m8 (Android 7.1.2)
• Phone vendor / model: m8 (HTC)
• Application was downloaded from (use [x]):
  • Play Store
  • F-Droid
  • Other (Nightly Build)
• Did this work in a previous version?
  • Yes
  • No
  • NA / Don't know.

Description

Just like in #584, I encountered the same problem but the solution suggested didn't work and here's why:

All my music library on my PC and on my android device (synced with rsync) is sorted and organized with beets. With it, I configured that (besides multi disc albums,) all my albums will be on the main music directory. Besides that, beets is using albumartist for tagging the whole album's artist and not just the artist tag. It uses the artist tag in addition to the albumartist tag. And when an album has multiple artists performing in it, it's tracks' artist tag will be different from the albumartist tag when a foreign artist performing a specific track. IMHO, it's a much better approach towards a correct organization of the music library and Vanilla Music should follow it as well.
Besides that, if a release album is divided to multiple discs, beets will tag all of the tracks with the same value for the album tag even though it has divided to multiple discs.

Steps to reproduce the issue

1. Create the following directories on your main music directory:

music/Greatest Hits - artist1/
music/Greatest Hits - artist2/
music/Yet another album by artist3/CD1
music/Yet another album by artist3/CD2
music/The Best of artist4/

2. In the 1st directory, put some music files and fill their albumartist and artist tag with the value artist1 and their album tag with the value Greatest Hits.
3. In the 2nd directory, put some music files and fill their albumartist and artist tag with the value artist2 and their album tag with the value Greatest Hits.
4. Inside Yet another album by artist3's 2 subdirectories, put some music files and fill their albumartist and artist tag with the value artist3 and their album tag with the value Yet another album by artist3.
5. In the last directory, put some music files and fill their albumartist (not artist) tag with the value artist4, fill their album tag with the value The Best of artist4 and their artist tag with artist4 for most of the tracks and for some tracks use the value artist1 for the tag artist.
6. Rescan Your music library.
7. Make sure that in (Setting -> Library screen -> Tab order), 'Album Artists' tab is enabled and preferably 'Artists' tab is disabled.

With 'Group albums by folder' setting disabled (Setting -> Media Library)

8. Go back to the Library screen and go to the 'Album Artists' tab.
9. Press 'artist1' to view albums by this Album Artist.

• Notice that tracks by 'artist2' appear there as well - this is what's reported in albums with the same name #584.

With 'Group albums by folder' setting enabled (Setting -> Media Library)

8. Go back to the Library screen and go to the 'Albums' tab.

• First of all, without entering to any specific album, while scrolling through the list, you can spot that there are multiple items on the list for every disc for 'Yet another album by artist3'. It's because we enabled 'Group albums by folder' which I think would have been better if turned off. That's not so bad but it's not ideal IMO.
• The 2nd problem appears when entering to the album 'The Best of artist4':
  Once we are inside it, we see only the album's tracks and this is how it should be. In addition, the filter indicator at the bottom of the screen is showing both the artist tag value and the album tag value. The problem appears when we press the Back button: we see not only the albums by 'artist4' but also the album 'Greatest Hits - artist1' - that's because Vanilla Music is filtering with the artist tag and not the albumartist.

Solution suggestion

Generally, it seems that Vanilla Music is not consistent when choosing to read the albumartist's tag value and the album's tag value. Or it could be, that even when 'Group albums by folder' setting is enabled, Vanilla Music assumes that my music library is organized in a <artists>/<albums>/<tracks> structure, I'm not sure though..

I think we should add options to choose what tags will automatically create those filters. Thus it enabling users to adopt Vanilla Music to their tagging habits.

[adrian-bl]

It's because we enabled 'Group albums by folder' which I think would have been better if turned off.
That's not so bad but it's not ideal IMO.

Every album we list has an unique ID: what 'group album by folder' does is to change how we calculate unique id's for albums: The default is to hash the album name found in tags. Enabling the 'group album by folder' option changes this to instead hash the path of the file (Well: its parent folder).

that's because Vanilla Music is filtering with the artist tag and not the albumartist.

Yes, this is correct: The Limiter (= the gray filter at the bottom) does not really track your 'journey': Selecting any album will always create a Limiter with the selected album AND its primary artist (See #652). This wasn't an issue when we didn't expose the album_artist, but now is super confusing to users of this tab.

Vanilla Music assumes that my music library is organized in a //
structure, I'm not sure though..

Vanilla Music doesn't care much about the library folder layout (apart from the album grouping, as explained above).
I'm not sure whats the best thing to do, but IMO we should just fix how the Limiter gets created:
Selecting an Album while an Album Artist limiter is active, should probably re-use this filter instead of just silently switching it to an Artist limiter.

Also see #659 which describes (almost) the same issue.

[doronbehar]

Ideally, I would have preferred to keep the option 'Group albums by folder' disabled, and perhaps make the 'Limiter' actually follow the filters I'm pressing. I think that's the natural feeling users get when they see the behavior of that gray line..

[mathstuf]

I seem to be seeing something related to this. When doing album shuffling, all of my "Greatest Hits" albums (from ~7 artists) got grouped together. They also all share album art in the playlist view (which ends up being inconsistent with the art in the notification…sometimes). Is this basically this issue or is it a new one?