Playing Compiled Albums in Volumio

Volumio Development Bug reports
1

Current version of Volumio (v2.6.19) has a problem in playing an entire compiled album or adding such albums altogether to the play queue.

Problem

The album with the following properties cannot be added altogether to the play queue:

  • All the songs in the album are tagged with the same ALBUMARTIST field, but the value of ALBUMARTIST is not included in the ARTIST field of any songs in this album.
  • No values defined in Compilation Metadata Fields (in the Music Library Settings section of the My Music setting) are used in the ARTIST field of any songs in this album.

For example, the metadata block of an output of metaflac for a song in such an album looks like the following:

METADATA block #2
  type: 4 (VORBIS_COMMENT)
  is last: false
  length: 193
  vendor string: reference libFLAC 1.2.1 20070917
  comments: 8
    comment[0]: TITLE=Ho Hey
    comment[1]: ARTIST=The Lumineers
    comment[2]: ALBUMARTIST=Grammy
    comment[3]: ALBUM=2013 Grammy Nominees
    comment[4]: DATE=2013
    comment[5]: TRACKNUMBER=14
    comment[6]: TRACKTOTAL=22
    comment[7]: GENRE=Pop

Therefore, the songs from this 2013 Grammy Nominees album cannot be added to the play queue as an album collection altogether, while each song can be added individually.

Cause

It seems that the Play and Add to Queue functions for these compiled albums cannot operate solely on the ALBUM field of the songs in such albums, but have to depend on how the ALBUMARTIST and ARTIST fields of these songs are set. Moreover, current situation is that even the display of compiled albums in the album view mode depends on the ALBUMARTIST field, such that a compiled album without the ALBUMARTIST field will be divided into multiple albums and each of such sub-albums corresponds to a unique ARTIST value.

Solution

The solution is to implement the Play and Add to Queue functions for albums without any dependency on the ALBUMARTIST and ARTIST fields, such that these function even work for the albums without the ALBUMARTIST field.

2

possibly a non related cause , but i also had compilation albums not working with the play album option. Individual songs worked well.

Solution to my problem was to remove a space in the My Music - Compilation Metadata fields: So not:

Various,various,Various Artists,various artists,VA,va, Diversen, diversen (notice the spaces before the last two)

but

Various,various,Various Artists,various artists,VA,va,Diversen,diversen

After that, no problems… Hope it helps you or others

3

Next release will have a fix for this issue

4

Glad to hear this! Keep it up!

5

Oh really? Thanks for the tip and I will try out this trick when get home.

Essentially, such tagging scheme for compiled albums is arbitrary and many posts in the past have mentioned this point as well. The ultimate and bug-free solution will be an implementation of indexing and playing songs with their album names, as I mentioned in my post. This shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, as many other popular music software don’t have this particular issue.

My suggestion for end users is to put their music files into some organized folder/directory structures (e.g. artist --> album --> disc --> songs) and have each song fully tagged and correctly named. By following in this way, even when the advanced cross-referencing functions based on the tags break down due to software bugs, users are still able to navigate their music library through the organized folders. This is how I play my entire albums for now.

6

I’m on 2.632 and the problem still persists… is this normal behaviour or should it already be fixed by now?

Thanks in advance for your help, Michelangelo!

7

This still hasn’t been fixed!. A workaround is to set the ALBUMARTIST field to “Various” for all compilation albums where this field is blank (admittedly tedious… I’ve done it) or in your case to add the string “Grammy” to Sources > Music Library Settings > Compilation Metadata Fields. Of course this only solves the problem for compilations that have “Grammy” as the album artist.