Bugzilla – Bug 4146
Incorrect library stats and bad artist links - problem with compilations?
Last modified: 2009-01-29 09:47:19 UTC
I'm using 6.5b3 on Linux with the default settings for Behavior/Compilations. All my files are FLAC files. Lots of my files are from compilation albums, but I don't use the COMPILATION tag. I only use the Alternative genre with a certain group of 129 compilation albums. I use the Rock genre with about 226 non-compilation albums and 17 compilation albums. I'm using the default skin. I have MP3 versions of all of the FLAC files imported into iTunes, but that's separate from SlimServer. When I browse artists, I see: Home / Artists 621 albums with 7463 songs by 475 artists. The song count looks good, but the artist count is too low. iTunes says 615 / 7465 / 2192. I don't expect the numbers to match exactly due to human error, but artists is way wrong. When I browse the Alternative genre: Home / Genres / Alternative 261 albums with 4113 songs by 1982 artists. These numbers are way off (but see how artists is higher than before). iTunes says 129 / 2438 / 1989. Clicking on most of the artist names results in (as an example): Home / Genres / Alternative / 764-HERO 0 albums with 0 songs by 0 artists. No album links for the artist are shown. Now with the Rock genre of mostly non-compilations: Home / Genres / Rock 417 albums with 4669 songs by 335 artists. These numbers are just strange. iTunes says 386 / 4468 / 243. In this genre when I click on an artist it looks like only those on compilation albums result in 0 / 0 / 0. For a non-compilation artist, things look correct: Home / Genres / Rock / Boston 3 albums with 26 songs by 1 artist. All Songs Boston (1976) Don't Look Back (1978) Third Stage (1986) The album links appear as expected.
you should use the compilation tag if you want slimserver to work right. there are other issues, but slimserver WILL require the compilation tag for 100% solution. stats count is probably related to bug 3806
If you find you have tracks that are not showing up, or cannot play, this would be a "major" bug. The fact that the counts don't match iTunes does not meet the criteria. That said, we'll certainly look into it. If you can find a specific album or track that is obviously misbehaving that would be a great help.
It's more than the counts. I can't select a song by most of the artists on these compilation albums when browsing or searching by artist. That's why I chose Major. I'm sorry I didn't make that more clear. I can find them when searching by song names, though, which I didn't realize before. There are probably more than 1000 artists in my library that are affected this way. As an example, I'll use the artist "Queens Of The Stone Age". I have 3 songs from them on 3 separate compilation albums in the Alternative Genre. When I browse by Artist, they don't appear. I see (edited): Home / Artists ... The Pursuit Of Happiness Pusherman Queen R.E.M. The Raconteurs ... When I browse by Genre Alternative they show up, but clicking on their name results in: Home / Genres / Alternative / Queens Of The Stone Age 0 albums with 0 songs by 0 artists. No song titles appear. When I search for "queens" I get no results of any kind. Not even a message that says nothing was found. If I search for "queen", I get: Artists matching "queen": 1 Queen Albums matching "queen": 1 Queen Elvis (1989) Song titles matching "queen": 16 All Songs Amplification Of The Queen Bee - Rye Coalition from CMJ 8/99 God Killed The Queen - Louis XIV from CMJ Volume 132 Killer Queen - Queen from Greatest Hits May Queen - Liz Phair from Whip-Smart Mr. Queen - American Minor from American Minor Pop Queen - Ben Lee from CMJ 6/95 The Queen And The Soldier - Suzanne Vega from Suzanne Vega Queen For A Day - Dance Hall Crashers from Lockjaw Queen Of All Ears - Lounge Lizards from CMJ 8/98 Queen Of Hollywood - The Corrs from Talk On Corners Special Edition Queen Of Spades - Styx from Pieces Of Eight Queen Of The Air - Everclear from Sparkle and Fade Queen Of The Underworld - Jesse Malin from CMJ 3/03 RX Queen - Deftones from CMJ 7/00 Veins Of The Queen - Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians from Queen Elvis Veins Of The Queen (Royal Mix) - Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians from Queen Elvis But no "Queens Of The Stone Age". If I choose to play all of Genre Alternative, then the songs get properly added to Now Playing. And I can search by song name: Song titles matching "little sister": 1 Little Sister - Queens Of The Stone Age from CMJ Volume 131 Clicking on the song name looks normal (edited for formatting): Title: Little Sister Artist: Queens Of The Stone Age Album: CMJ Volume 131 Genre: Alternative Track: 3 Compilation: Yes File Format: FLAC Duration: 2:54 Volume Adjustment: -10.72 dB Album Volume Adjustment: -9.58 dB Year: 2005 File Length: 20,565,140 Bytes Bitrate: 944kbps CBR Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz Location: /net/calculon/music/flac/cmj/2005/131/little_sister.flac (Download) Date Modified: Saturday, April 30, 2005, 8:07:06 am Interesting. It says "Compilation: Yes", but I'm not using the tag. Here's a metadata dump of that file: ARTIST=Queens Of The Stone Age TITLE=Little Sister ALBUM=CMJ Volume 131 DATE=2005 GENRE=Alternative TRACKNUMBER=03 REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK=0.98855591 REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN=-10.72 dB REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK=1.00000000 REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_GAIN=-9.58 dB
Is all the affected content from iTunes? That is, does it show up in iTunes and you can manage it there? What version of iTunes are you using? As far as I know there's no iTunes for linux. :) Could you describe briefly how you have your drives set up to work with SlimServer and iTunes? With regards to SlimServer, I'd specifically like to know where is your Music Folder set to in the SlimServer server settings page? Is 'use iTunes' checked?
We don't support iTunes running over a shared network drive to a non-Windows or OS X machine.
I use iTunes completely separately from SlimServer. I only mentioned iTunes to show that the album/song/artist counts were wrong in SlimServer. I rip everything to FLAC on Linux and point SlimServer at the parent directory where all the FLAC files are stored. The FLAC files are on the same system and disk where SlimServer is running. "Use iTunes" is _not_ checked. Separately, I generate MP3s from the FLAC files and store these in another directory tree. Then, I manually import the MP3s into iTunes for use on an iPod. iTunes is running on a Mac and accessing the files via Samba. But iTunes plays no part in this issue.
We count albums/artists/track differently than iTunes. You can't use it as a barometer for SlimServer.
Fair enough. But should the number of artists be 4X less on SlimServer? And should the number artists in a genre be larger than the overall number? In any event, it seems like the wrong count is only a symptom of a larger issue with most artists on compilation albums being non-browseable and non-searchable. I haven't figured out what's different about the artists on compilation albums that aren't affected. I thought it might be because they appear on playlists, but I've found exceptions.
Perhaps I should add that I didn't have these issues with 6.3.1.
At the risk of making myself look like a fool, I've started poking around the database. Maybe what I've found will be helpful. It looks like each compilation album has been properly flagged as a compilation. Perhaps there's no need to tag them that way myself. Of 173 albums flagged as compilations, only 2 have more than 1 row in contributor_album. (Those 2 have as many rows as the actual CDs have tracks). I have no idea what makes those 2 albums different from the others. Their IDs are 161 and 167 (out of 621). My guess is that this is causing the display problems (because of the JOINs on contributor_album to filter by role?). So another guess is that the problem's in the scanner.
Another data point. I did a Clear & Rescan and kept reloading Home / Artists. I saw the artist count increase to what looked the the correct value. The list of artists included those in compilations. Then, at some point, the artist count started to decrease. Compilation artists started disappearing from the list. So another uninformed guess is that perhaps there's an issue in the compilation post-processing.
Turn off 'Group Various Artists' under Settings -> Behavior
Under Settings -> Behavior , Compilations, I have: List compilation albums under each artist List albums by all artists for that album The config file contains: variousArtistAutoIdentification: 0 useBandAsAlbumArtist: 0
(Running 6.5 proper (non-beta) now) Here's another data point, for what it's worth. I added another compilation album to my collection, and as I often do when adding just a single album instead of rescanning I just browsed to the directory. The results were what I would expect for a compilation album: The artists appear correctly when browsing artists. Clicking on their names shows the correct link to the album. I can find the artists by searching. The count of artists was incremented correctly. In the database I noticed that this album is not marked as a compilation. Also, there are multiple rows for it in contributor_album.
My previous comment may be a red herring. After a clear and rescan, that same album still shows up correctly. So that makes 3 out of 174 compilation albums with more than 1 entry in contributor_album.
There are a couple of fixes going in to 6.5.1 that may fix this bug. Please have a look when we release it (later this week). I'll leave this open and targeted for 7.0 for now until I have a chance to look at it some more.
This bug is still in 6.5.1, but I just installed 6.5.2 11677 and the bug appears to be gone. Thanks!
Closing this bug for now. If anyone sees this behavior please feel free to re-open.
This bug is being closed since it was resolved for a version which is now released! Please download the new version of SqueezeCenter (formerly SlimServer) at http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html If you are still seeing this bug, please re-open it and we will consider it for a future release.