Conflicting album artist values

[simoncn]

(19-06-2012 13:01)retraite Wrote:  Using Minimserver 0.5, I'm receiving in the log, a list of messages such as this

Warning: conflicting ALBUMARTIST values for file Classical/BBC Music/BBC Volume 1, No 4, Music for Christmas/04 Gombert, Ave sanctissima Maria, motet for 5 voices.flac
first conflicting value: BBC Singers
second conflicting value: Simon Joly, Bo Holten


From the information given in the minimserver log, the problem appears to relate to tagging on a number of my BBC Music albums. I have uninstalled version 0.5, reinstalled minim 0.31 and all is, on the face of it, working well again. The tagging information on the albums mentioned in the log appears without problem. The only element that seems to mark the albums warned about as different (when I have looked at the albums in mp3 tag) is the use of a double backslash to separate multiple artists, under the artist tag. I've not experienced any similar problems before. I thought that I understood the nature of tagging reasonably well, but clearly I was mistaken.

My PC is running Windows 7, 64 bit version.

Is anyone able to offer an explanation and a means resolving the problem?

This is telling you that the file is tagged with multiple ALBUMARTIST values (not ARTIST values). It's fine to have multiple ARTIST values, but you can only have one ALBUMARTIST value for the entire contents of an album. This is because the ALBUMARTIST value is a special value which is used to provide the artist information for the entire album (for example, when looking at a list of albums). This can be useful when you have a lot of different artists on a single album.

The Mp3tag double backslash is used to indicate multiple values. This is why you're only getting the problem where you have used double backslashes.

If you change these tags from ALBUMARTIST to ARTIST (and leave the double backslashes as they are), everything should be fine, without any warnings. You'll also get better indexing using the Artist and All Artists selections.