As a classical music lover, I have different albums with the same piece rendered by different albums. Already in legacy versions of Audirvāna this issue existed and I would expect that by now this would be resolved, unfortunately not.
These albums (sometimes over 10 albums) have the same Album Title (say ‘Goldberg Variations’). Each album is rendered by a different artist. Since in legacy versions this caused problems, I use the tag sort as title (so “Goldberg Variations [Tureck]”). This works most of the time. However not when I have more than 5 or 6 albums (with different tags).
So though the tags Artist, Album Artist and Sort as title differ, after loading about 5 or 6 of these albums into Audirvāna (either Origin or Studio) the albums are mixed up. The 6th and ensuing albums are then added to this 5th (or 6th) Album.
Mixed up in in a very peculiar way, since not just the Audirvāna library is mixed up, the Artwork of the individual files is altered as well. The files of the ensuing album are saved with Artwork of the 5th of 6th album they are added to. Moreover in such a way the wrongly assigned Artwork cannot be remove the normal way (Yate, dBpoweramp).
When can we expect a solution for this nasty bug?
How can I resolve this?
What I tried so far:
I repaired the tags (reset Album Artists to the original value) and artwork (reset to the original artwork).
I did database maintenance.
I removed the files to outside from the library directory (that is synced with Audirvāna) and added album after album again (this usually works but that is were I found out that it occurs time and again after 5 or 6 albums).
I have deleted the database and started all over again.
All of this to no avail.
I hope you can help me out on this one, because apart from this, I love the SQ of Audirvāna.
I mostly also use classical music files. This has been an issue for me in the past.
However, I resolved this issue by careful editing metadata on every album, using “sort as” (here I use last name of composer). When I have several versions of a piece I simply add 1 or 2 etc in the order I want these to appear.
Beethoven Symphonies, for instance:
Beethoven Symphonies
“Beethoven S 5”
“Beethoven S 6”
Piano Concertos
“Beethoven PC 2”
Quartets
“Beethoven Q 1”
It is complicated but is really effective.
That process took a lot of hours. (I also have three copies of the Audirvana source file, copied after I make changes in Audirvana.) That bit is critical although, touch wood, I’ve never lost the original source file.
I now edit metadata every time I add an album.
That bit is also critical in order to keep things neat.
It is a great pity that metadata conformity is not a solution every supplier can agree on. Still, the mystery of life is diversity.
Dear Phil,
Thanks very much that you took the time to reply. Amazing to see that independently we developed the same routine. I am tagging (FLAC only) files in the same manner as you do.
(Haydn - symphonies, Haydn - string quartets, etc etc)
However when I have different versions of a single piece such as a Mahler symphony or the Goldberg Variations, I use the below routine. So I would think that this should work the same , since it basically follows the same routine. Nonetheless the albums are mixed up. When checking the tags I find that Audirvāna changed the (Album) Artists and some times even the Artwork (f.i. changed ‘Lars Vogt’ into ‘Rosalyn Tureck’).
So to my regret, I keep running into this issue. There appears to be a relation to the number of albums with the same name, when limited to 3 albums it works as you indicated. I find it rather frustrating.
