Annoying "album" presentation in App ...

Posted by: MichaelSch on 02 February 2015

Hi out there,

 

I find the following issue quite annoying and would like to hear if there is a solution for it ...

 

I use iPads/iPhones to navigate my music collection through SSD UnityServe and SuperUnity. The problem is that when I would like to listen to an album with different artists for the different tracks the App presents the album as several different albums. For example, the soundtrack of The Two Towers from the Lord of the Rings (the complete recordings) is presented as 9 different albums, where the tracks are distributed into these 9 albums. One album with artist Howard Shore another album with artist Howard Shore and Miranda Otto, etc. This means I cannot select the entire album unless I select all of them and get a rather random play order .... This really annoying. Am I missing something here or can it be settled through tagging the tracks another way?

 

Another annoying this is that if the titles are long I can't get access to the title part that runs over the edge of the display. And often the last part of the title would be " .... (Disc 1)" or ".... (Disc 2)", but I can't see that and hence don't know which album is disc 1 or 2, etc. The App does not allow that I turn the iPhone or iPad to the long side (wide view instead of tall view).

 

Thanks for any inputs.

Posted on: 02 February 2015 by mrspoon

You have 2 choices to group it together:

 

Add a compilation tag to all tracks in that one album with a value of 1

Set an Album Artist to: Howard Shore

Posted on: 02 February 2015 by ChrisH

Or the other option is to change the tagging of the album name to 'The Two Towers Soundtrack' and change the song title to 'Howard Shore - Track Name'.

That way you end up with one album with multiple tracks presented in the app whilst still being able to see the artist.

That irritated me with compilations too, MichaelSch, but by making the tagging adjustment above it works OK for me now.

 

It won'tsolve the problem of long album or track titles not displaying in the app though unfortunately.

Maybe a change for a future release to have titles scrolling or something similar.

Posted on: 02 February 2015 by hungryhalibut

This is nothing to do with the app; it's the tagging of the files themselves. I have loads of compilations that I ripped from CD and all are fine. On the other hand I downloaded one album where each track had slightly different artists, and until I fixed the metadata it was showing as several albums.

Posted on: 03 February 2015 by ChrisH

I didnt find that any of the compilations I ripped to my US came out with tagging that was OK for me, HH.

I seem to remember most of them came out as the same album OK, but as I wanted to see the artist as well as the track name, I manually retagged (via n-Serve App, nice and easy of course) with 'artist - track name' as I mentioned above.

But as you say, the App simply presents the information that it is served with.

Posted on: 03 February 2015 by MichaelSch
Originally Posted by Hungryhalibut:

This is nothing to do with the app; it's the tagging of the files themselves. I have loads of compilations that I ripped from CD and all are fine. On the other hand I downloaded one album where each track had slightly different artists, and until I fixed the metadata it was showing as several albums.

In this case, what exactly did you change in the metadata?

It is going to be quite a large job as I have a number of albums to edit, so looking for the easiest way of course.