Problem with Album Sort

[GavinB]

Hi Folks
For a long time I've been using the Album Sort tag to do exactly as you might think - sort my albums. I set them all to Year - Album Title. That way I see the albums in chronological order when I browse by Album Artist. I know this probably isn't the best solution for this issue, but it worked for me and I've been doing it for ages.

Cut to the present. I've just got a Melco CD ripper and I'm in the process of re-ripping my CDs. The rips don't have any sort tags so I'm having to add them all back in (using dbPowerAmp's tag editor). Again, mostly working, but I'm having an issue with the albums under Ryan Adams. No matter what I do, I can't seem to get the albums to appear in the expected order (and I can't figure out what order they are appearing in - certainly not alphabetical).

Is there a way to force a full re-build of indexes? I've been using Rescan under MinimWatch but I don't know if that's doing enough.

Is there something I can check to see what's going on?

Thanks
Gavin

[simbun]

(01-02-2024 08:49)GavinB Wrote:  Is there a way to force a full re-build of indexes? I've been using Rescan under MinimWatch but I don't know if that's doing enough.

Yes there are better ways to sort them in MinimServer( Album.sortTags={Date, Album} ), but to perform a full rescan set the MinimServer property:

Code:

startupScan: full

then perform a rescan.

[GavinB]

Thanks, Simbun. This property was set to false although I'm not sure how! I'm giving it a go on Full, then I'll swap it back to True. Not surprisingly the full scan is taking a while for 3500 albums.

[GavinB]

Doesn't seem to have changed the order. I'll have to do the WriteTags file to see what it thinks is being picked up.

[simbun]

(01-02-2024 12:31)GavinB Wrote:  Doesn't seem to have changed the order. I'll have to do the WriteTags file to see what it thinks is being picked up.

Or change the content directory to point to just the Ryan Adams folder and add albumsort as an index. It would also speed up the scanning whilst you're problem solving.

[simoncn]

Regarding the need for a full rescan, this is required only if you are using a tagging program that doesn't change "last modified" file dates when updating tags.

For dBpoweramp PerfectTUNES ID Tags, this is controlled by the "Preserve Modified Date on Tag Write" setting. This should be set to false to enable MinimServer rescanning to work correctly.

[GavinB]

Thanks, Simon, I'll revert to that value.

I've been looking through the log file and I think this problem stems from having multiple albums with repeated names. I'm hoping the writeAllTags options will allow me to see which are repeats.

[simbun]

(02-02-2024 07:34)GavinB Wrote:  I've been looking through the log file and I think this problem stems from having multiple albums with repeated names. I'm hoping the writeAllTags options will allow me to see which are repeats.

I'm not sure writeAllTags will help because it doesn't associate one tag to another. Doesn't the log file tell you all the album titles that have been repeated? From memory it won't show all the albumsort values, but you shouldn't need those if you have the album.

With the problems identified in the log can't you use your tagging program to filter the problem albums, not that you can really resolve them as such because an album can only match to a single albumsort value, this is why Album.sortTags is the better option.

I don't suppose you use foobar2000? foobar has a plugin called foo_sqlite that will help you to identify all these types of issue, although 'Greatest Hits' would be a good start

[GavinB]

Yes, it was duplicated Album names - I should have remembered from when this caught me out in the past. In this case it was Hearbreaker - Ryan Adams and Free.