Need Help Cleaning up ALBUMARTIST log errors

[SonicREP]

(09-09-2023 09:25)simoncn Wrote:  I tried this with the file you sent and I don't get the conflict message (as expected). There must be something in your setup that is causing this. Please try the following with your test library:

1) Set the startupScan property to Full
2) Select Rescan (not Restart)

Simoncn, Thanks for your the help. It is a Mea Culpa. I had a rule in my tagUpdate to try to overwrite the AlbumArtist to be “Various Artist”. I had forgotten about myTagUpdates file. Your suggestion to use writeAllTags didn’t show the problem (I guess it’s report comes early in the processing of the tags) and didn’t show the tagUpdate additions. Is there another tracing/logging mechanism that I could have used to discover the problem myself?

This album has tracks by two different artists (tagged using the ARTIST tags) but the album is attributed to one of them so the AlbumArtist was set to “John Williams”. My attempt was to use tagUpdates to not edit my files (a feature I like) and overwrite the existing AlbumArtist with “Various Artist”. Instead I was adding a second AlbumArtist which caused the conflict. I can see this is expected behavior but it is not what I wanted to do.

So in this album I wanted to replace AlbumArtist=John Wiliams with AlbumArtist=Various Artist. Obviously I could do it explicitly with tagUpdate matching rules for this album, but I have many others in my collection that I have flagged for similar modification. The exact match rule for tagUpdates mean you have to enumerate all possibilities which is not ideal.

Is there a way to use tagUpdate or any other method to selectively remove a tag without explicitly matching its value, and completely replace it with another value? I immediately thought of using wildcard matches (ie replace all matches), but unfortunately, they are not supported in tagUpdates.

MY tagUpdates rule was:
/***********************************
* Rename Compilations
/***********************************
@ALBUM=Echoes of London
@ALBUM=Michael Tilson Thomas Conducts Ives
... many more ...
+ALBUMARTIST=Various Artists

I could have put this before the last line for an exact match
-ALBUMARTIST=John Williams
But that wouldn't be correct for all the others.
So I'd have to enumerate each album and duplicate the rule.
Ideally a wildcard would match anything and remove those tags first
-ALBUMARTIST=*

Maybe I am being too ambitious with tagUpdates and manipulating tags. Can you suggest an alternative method or a better approach that preserves not editing the music files directly?

Thanks