Need Help Cleaning up ALBUMARTIST log errors

[SonicREP]

I've read forum posts about cleaning conflicting ALBUMARTIST log errors, but my log has multiple errors, including one for an entire album with ALBUMARTIST set for each track. It feels different than the ones I've read about. I've isolated an example to a single file.

Starting MinimServer[Jukebox-MacBook-Pro.local]
Warning: conflicting ALBUMARTIST values ignored for file 02. La Volta.flac
first conflicting value: John Williams
second conflicting value: Various Artists
Library contains 1 audio files in 1 folders

What confuses me is the source of the conflict. The file doesn't have any tags for Various Artists or a compilation flag set. All tags related to Artist and Album Artists are set to the same name.

I used Mp3Tag to tag the file and checked its extended tags feature, which doesn't display multiple Album Artists. I've also used a website https://audio-tag-analyzer.netlify.app/ to independently analyze the file with no indication of a conflicting ALBUMARTIST that I could see. Here is what the site reported:

File information
Name 02. La Volta.flac
File type audio/flac
Size 8 MB
Last modified Mon May 01 2023 07:17:53 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
Quality information
No issues found
Embedded cover art

Format image/jpeg
Type Cover (front)
Description cover
Format
Label Value Property name
Audio container FLAC container
Audio codec(s) FLAC codec
Tag header type(s) vorbis tagTypes
Duration 124.04 seconds duration
Bit-rate 563 kbps bitrate
Sample-rate 44.1 hz sampleRate
Audio bit depth 16 bitsPerSample
Lossless? true lossless
Number of channels 2 numberOfChannels
Generic tags
Label Value Property name
Track title La Volta title
Track number 2 / 14 track
Disk or media number null disk
Artist John Williams artist
Artists John Williams artists
Album artist John Williams albumartist
Composer William Byrd composer
Release year 1986 year
Album Echoes of London album
Release date 1986-01-01 date
Release label name(s) n/a label
Genres Classique genre
Copyright. © 1986 Sony Music Entertainment copyright
Native tags vorbis
Key Value
TITLE La Volta
TRACKNUMBER 2
COMPOSER William Byrd
ARTIST John Williams
LABEL n/a
GENRE Classique
ALBUMARTIST John Williams
TRACKTOTAL 14
ALBUM Echoes of London
DATE 1986-01-01
COPYRIGHT © 1986 Sony Music Entertainment
METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE [object Object]

Both Mp3Tag and the Website only shows a single ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST
Is there something I'm missing in using the tags properly?

[simoncn]

Please try using the MinimServer writeAllTags property to see the tags that MinimServer has found when scanning this file.

Also, please post your MinimServer profile (configuration settings).

[SonicREP]

(07-09-2023 22:13)simoncn Wrote:  Please try using the MinimServer writeAllTags property to see the tags that MinimServer has found when scanning this file.

Also, please post your MinimServer profile (configuration settings).

Simon, I tried MinimServer writeAllTags and it generated the same information as the other methods.

ALBUM=Echoes of London
ALBUMARTIST=John Williams
ARTIST=John Williams
COMPOSER=William Byrd
COPYRIGHT=© 1986 Sony Music Entertainment
DATE=1986-01-01
GENRE=Classique
LABEL=n/a
TITLE=La Volta
TRACKNUMBER=2
TRACKTOTAL=14

I'll send a zip of my default.profile, the all tags.txt, and also a PDF from the Audio Tag Analyzer website.

So no new clues. On a hunch that didn't help, I remove the property I had been using "tagValue = AlbumArtist.default={Artist}". LMK other things to try or if you'd like the FLAC file I can make that accessible.

[simoncn]

Thanks for all this. There is nothing here to indicate where the conflicting tag ALBUMARTIST=Various Artists is coming from.

Are you getting the conflict message when scanning a test library containing just this one file? Your earlier post implies this. I would normally expect this conflict to be caused by having another file in the same album tagged with ALBUMARTIST=Various Artists but this cannot be the case if your test library contains only this file.

Please make the FLAC file accessible so that I can try scanning it in a test library.

[SonicREP]

(08-09-2023 20:56)simoncn Wrote:  Thanks for all this. There is nothing here to indicate where the conflicting tag ALBUMARTIST=Various Artists is coming from.

Are you getting the conflict message when scanning a test library containing just this one file? Your earlier post implies this. I would normally expect this conflict to be caused by having another file in the same album tagged with ALBUMARTIST=Various Artists but this cannot be the case if your test library contains only this file.

Please make the FLAC file accessible so that I can try scanning it in a test library.

Yes, I isolated a single file into a library - here is link to the folder referenced in the default.profile I sent earlier.

https://www.turtry.com/upload/TagTest.zip

What I had done to set my properties was to delete all the contentDirs, add one for the folder containing the track, that is the default.profile I sent.

I realize I didn't restart the server. Thinking it might a cache problem, I retried those steps, fully stopping the server, and then restart (which does a scan).
Same result

Starting MinimServer[Jukebox-MacBook-Pro.local]
Warning: conflicting ALBUMARTIST values ignored for file 02. La Volta.flac
first conflicting value: John Williams
second conflicting value: Various Artists
Library contains 1 audio files in 1 folders

[simoncn]

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)

[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

[simoncn]

You can use the writeTagChanges property to see a list of tag changes made by tagUpdate.

To do what you want, you can do the following:

1) Change your tagUpdate file to this:
@ALBUM=Echoes of London
@ALBUM=Michael Tilson Thomas Conducts Ives
... many more ...
+ALBUMARTISTUPDATE=Various Artists

2) Add AlbumArtistUpdate to itemTags

3) Put the following in tagValue:
AlbumArtist.replace={AlbumArtistUpdate}

4) Restart MinimServer

You can use any name instead of AlbumArtistUpdate.