Bugzilla – Bug 6444
Multiple "No Album" albums
Last modified: 2011-05-24 11:04:45 UTC
I've seen a return of this issue - I think I've reported it before in the past (but can't find any bugs), but it's not been repeatable, or was considered fixed. It definitely still happens though. I did a complete rescan. I had one "No Album" album, containing all artists with no album tag. I ripped some more CD singles. When I do this, I often clear the Album tag, as I like them to appear under Artist->No Album instead. I did a scan for new and changed songs. I think I may have not cleared all of the album tags for these new songs, so I opened up a tag editor and ensured that all album tags were cleared. I did a scan for new and changed songs. I now have the majority of my songs (1137 songs) with no album tags in a "No Album" album. This appears at the top of the Albums list. However, I also have another "No Album" album, which is sorted under the letter N. This has 42 songs, all things that I have recently added (or recently added and then changed).
I was wondering if the issue is caused by having different folders containing songs by the same artist that have "No Album" songs. Eg, in my source folders I have something along the lines of: lossless\ Tori Amos\ Singles\ Song 1.flac lossy\ Tori Amos\ Singles\ Song 2.mp3 I thought that perhaps the current implementation of various artists/greatest hits problems may be causing this duplicated "No Album" problem. However, I have songs in the same folder that have now been split across the two "No Album" instances. Whenever I do a full rescan, the library is created correctly. So it's some issue with applying changes to a library due to "scan for new and changed files".
Are you sure your tagger didn't add the "No artist" to some of the recently added songs?
Also make sure you don't have any 3rd party plugin installed. CustomScan & Co. could influence the result.
Yes, my tags are fine. All songs do not have an ALBUM tag. I never set ALBUM="No Artist". I don't think that any third-party plugin is affecting this - erlands plugins for example don't touch the SC tables, they add their own tables as a post-scan event. I've seen this happen a few times over the last couple of years, before I had many plugins. A full scan fixes the problem. The problem only occurs after using partial scan for new and changed files. The main bulk of the "No Album" songs have album.id=3. The newer "No Album" has album.id=1640. I imagine that songs are originally scanned with an album name, so a new album row is created to store it. Then, if the ALBUM tag is removed and a scan for new and changed files is performed, the album name is changed to blank (or "No Album"), rather than point at the existing album.id=3.
> I don't think that any third-party plugin is affecting this - erlands plugins > for example don't touch the SC tables, they add their own tables as a post-scan > event. Could you please still try again without the plugins? Any bug report should be done with a clean system, unless we're interested in why it's misbehaving in a certain configuration. But we won't know it's due to the configuration unless we can't reproduce in a clean environment.
If I can find a repeatable way to get it to fail, I'll gladly try to repeat the problem with no plugins attached. The problem is that I don't always get this problem - it crops up from time to time. I tried again yesterday, after ripping some songs with album tags, scanning, removing the album tag and rescanning, but the songs were correctly merged with the existing "No Album" album. I'm wondering whether a scanner crash at some point in the past meant that some songs hadn't been merged correctly (I guess this is done as one of the latter phases, either Merging Various Artists or database cleanup). I did experience bug 6458 recently (artwork crashing the scanner), but I think I had the "No Album" problem before that, and artwork scanning is the last phase of scanning. I think the UI really needs some obvious indication if a scan fails/crashes. Eg. in that area at the bottom of the home page, it could indicate that a scan didn't complete, or the last successful scan time.
Not going to hold of up 7.0 for this, but please add more if you find a reproducible case or have a log of the issue.
Created attachment 2589 [details] The scanner.log for the scan that caused a second "No Album". I've done a few rescans to try to repeat the problem, but it's been fine. Until this evening - it's just happened again! Today I've been adding some missing artwork for my albums. I noticed that for some albums I only had a few tracks, so for these cases I removed the album and track number tags (I only use the album tag if I have ripped the whole album). I did a scan for new and changed files, and I now have another "No Album" with only 103 songs. I haven't spotted a pattern to the problem yet.
*** Bug 8198 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Is this the bug where the root cause is really that 'No Album' should be a special album where artist and other info are not treated the same as other albums?
where is the new_schema keyword? this bug might be related to bug 7515
i wonder if this bug no longer applies and should be closed since the new scanner work andy did?
Closing. Seems fixed. Will re-open if problem re-appears.