Albums with more than one artist show up as more than one album

[Einar Mostad]

Many albums have more than one artist. In the Music app (and many music players on Android like Google Play etc, but not VLC) each instance of the album with a new artist shows up as a new album. This means that it is impossible to play one album from start to finish by opening the album from the album view, as it is divided into many albums in stead of just being one album.

This is probably to avoid albums with names like "Greatest hits" or "Unknown" to show up as one long album with hundreds of artists (I saw another bug report about that problem). I would guess that for most album names that are not "Greatest hits", especially with track numbers forming a whole from 1 to whatever, it would be safe to assume that the different artists are in deed contributing to the same album.

[Scott Sweeny (ssweeny)]

In my experience the music app will do the right thing if you set the "Album Artist" field (e.g. to "Various Artists" for something like a soundtrack album). This field is visible/editable in at least Rhythmbox and Banshee, probably tagging programs like picard too (though I haven't checked).

[Einar Mostad (einarmostad)]

Thank you for that suggestion! I never thought about doing that. With 100+ GBs of music, editing the tags of all albums with more than one artist isn't as ideal as the programme just correctly displaying the albums in album view, but I will try to see if it fixes the problem short term for an album or two. Editing them all would be a month of work or more...

I suppose most people will never think about editing the tags from an album they bought online or ripped with a program that automatically sets tags if it recognises the album, so I still think this is a bug that needs fixing.

This problem is the reason why I use VLC on Android in stead of the two music players that came with my phone (Google Play and Sony Walkman.) It's much easier to use a player that is smart, than to change the tags of hundreds of albums. My tags are not unique, as I ripped my CDs with iTunes some years ago, other users ripping the same albums would probably have the same tags. For the Ubuntu touch music player, being able to correctly show albums in the album view would probably be a plus.