Problems with Auto Playlist, Random Album

[elembeee]

Hi there

I hope that someone can help me. I have an autoplaylist for my classical music collection which I have set up to sort by Random Album.
Unfortunately, MM does not seem to recognise the albums correctly. Some albums are grouped together, others are split up. Despite a lot of trial and error I cannot figure out why some tracks are all 'seen' as being part of one album and others aren't. I have ensured that all the tracks belonging to one album have the same Album name. I also thought maybe they had to have exactly the same artist name, but having tested that it doesn't seem to be the case.
Does anyone know how MM identifies which tracks are of one album?
I see from forum searches on 'Random Album' that everyone seems to use it very successfully and so am thinking there is something in the naming of my tracks that is causing this problem.
Below are two screenshots to show what I mean. In the first screenshot I have sorted the playlist manually by clicking on the album column. This correctly puts all the tracks together with their relevant album. Screenshot 2 shows what the autoplaylist 'random album' does. See for example how all the tracks of "Classical Collection 1" and "Classical Collection 2" are all split up.
I have just downloaded and installed the latest MM in case it was a bug but, no change!
I would greatly appreciate anyone's help with this.
Thank you.
Here is the url with the images (I can't work out how else to share the screenshots, I hope this works!):
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id ... 3XpenssNkU

[Lowlander]

There are plenty posts on this.

You will need to have the same Album Artist value for all tracks on the Album. In case of compilations use something like Various Artist and otherwise use the Artist who's Album it is.

http://imageshack.us is a good way to share images on the forum (they provide the necessary BBCode too) as GoogleDocs is requiring us to log in.

[rovingcowboy]

while that is to work as lowlander has said.

some times it does not work.
as in my case all my songs with various artist listed as the album artist, are being changed by mediamonkey.

he is taking the text out of that tag and leaving it blank and removing the album art from that track.
and wants me to make a single song album with that artist. and if the album has 20 songs by different artists
then i have 20 songs all with the same album name but with different artists.

monkey is also requirering that all songs on greatest hits have the album name of greatest hits of (Artist) what ever their name is. and that they also be listed as the album artist, only then will he let me have album art back on that song.

so this is making me have tons of single song albums with all the same album name but different artists


makes no sense to me why this is going on, but i hope they get it fixed in mm 4.

still won't go back now and re make the albums if they do i just will keep new ones as various i got to many to go back and re do again.

[Lowlander]

I have experienced none of RovingCowboy describes and not even sure I've seen anyone else.

@RovingCowboy if you can reproduce file a bug report instead.

[rovingcowboy]

can't reproduce any of it at will it just one of those things that happens lowlander. i see it by it showing the no album art
on the screen and i know i had art in every song. when i check the properties there is the empty tags. only way to keep the art is make it a single song album.

i'm not sure if it is in every format or just ogg format i don't use anything but ogg on the jukebox.

[elembeee]

Thank you Lowlander.
This has resolved my problem (I have luckily not got the complications mentioned by rovingcowboy).

Sorry, I really had tried to check the forum for previous answers but was searching 'random album' problems. I guess 'album split' would have been better keywords to search with?
Anyway, I appreciate you taking a moment to sort this out for me.

[jtotheh]

Hi, I'm getting this issue on my autoplaylists even if my entire album is set to the same album artist. I'll get 18 of the 20 tracks from an album, even though the other 2 tracks have the identical artist, album name, and album artist. Happens on multiple albums, all with the correct info.

Does anything else cause this?

[Lowlander]

What are you're AutoPlaylist rules?

If you right click on a track and use Find More from Same > Album does it find all 20 tracks or only the 18?

[Guest]

Hi Lowlander,

My autoplaylist settings are to exclude certain genres and custom fields and to sort by "Rating" first and "Random Album" second.

Yes, if I find more from same album, all the tracks show up, even the ones that are missing from the autoplaylist.

[Lowlander]

Could the exclusion rules be the reason certain tracks are missing? Also make sure these tracks aren't listed lower as you first sort on Rating.

[Guest]

Hmm, moving "Random Album" to the top seems to work as far as getting full albums in.

Now that you mention it, most of the missing tracks were my favorites, so I must have been searching for lower rated tracks first by mistake.

My goal is to find full albums that contain my top rated tracks - say one or two 4-5 star songs are on an album, I want to grab that full album. Is there an easier/better way to do this?


Thanks for your help!

[jtotheh]

Sorry, i've been posting as guest, but it's still me.

[Lowlander]

No, I don't think that is possible.

If you sort on Rating you split up Albums. If you set Rating > 4 any lower rated tracks will be missing. If you sort on Album you will just get an alphabetical list of Albums.

Addons like Magic Nodes might be able to achieve something like this: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... agic+nodes