Unknown albums and unknown artists should not be shown

[Michi Henning]

Unpack the attached archive into the Music folder and wait for mediascanner to finish indexing (takes a few minutes).

Now look at the album tab in the music app. There are hundreds of unknown albums at the beginning of the list.

The attached music collection has a lot of poorly tagged songs in it (just like many users' collections will have imperfectly tagged songs). There are lots of songs with an empty album tag. (Such songs are legit too because I might add, say, audio recordings of a meeting or audio books to my collection.)

The music app shows a separate "Unknown Album" for each and every song with an empty album tag. That's wrong. It should not show any album at all in this case because, by definition, a song with no album tag isn't part of any album--it's a stand-along song.
(Note that collapsing all songs without an album tag into a single album not an option because it would conflate many unrelated tracks into a single album that doesn't exist.)

This is how the mediascanner scope deals with empty albums; the music app should do the same thing.

[Victor Thompson (vthompson)]

We've discussed this before, and instead of showing a blank album or artist we decided to show "Unknown Album" or "Unknown Artist". Note that we did decide to filter out any blank genre from the Genres view. I agree with you--I think it'd be preferable to just filter any blank/null Album/Artist. Songs that are missing this data will show up in the Songs view.

ahayzen or popey, do you agree?

[Michi Henning (michihenning)]

If you try with the attached song collection, it becomes obvious that this doesn't work for poorly-tagged collections (which are common). There are loads and loads of "Unknown Album" entries to no good purpose. I really think it would work much better if we got rid of those entires, just like the mediascanner scope does.

[Jeroen Hoek (mail-jeroenhoek)]

I have the same problem, but with a music collection that is actually quite well-tagged. For a lot of (pop) music the actual album something came from is irrelevant and undesirable to have tagged, because it clutters up the album view of (other) music players. When I am browsing albums, I expect to see only albums I own in their entirety, not 'albums' that contain only that one-off hit and miss all other tracks.

The problem here is that any song that lacks the album tag, gets shown in the album view as a unique artist/album combination. Right now I have a thousand or so stand-alone tracks (starting with 10cc – Unknown Album and ending with ZZ Top – Unknown Album) to swipe-scroll through before I get to the real albums.

This takes about two minutes, and has to be done every time you open the music app. Rather unworkable.

I would suggest grouping all tracks that lack an album tag into a single 'Unknown Album' pseudo-album, regardless of artist.

[Jeroen Hoek (mail-jeroenhoek)]

(Problem present in OTA-11)

[Jeroen Hoek (mail-jeroenhoek)]

Temporary workaround:

In the album view, enter a single space in the search field. This seems to filter out all the 'Unknown Albums'.