Certain files cannot be added to library but can be added to the Play Queue

[Israel Byrd]

Certain albums will not show up in the library windows 1 or 2, but do show up in my .cmus/lib.pl file. I can play these tracks in the Play Queue window, so cmus can read them. It seems to be a property of entire albums, either all tracks are shown in the library or none are. There is no <No Name> group listed, and id3 -l showed all tags are present on these files anyway. For example, 10,000 Maniacs 'The Wishing Chair' album will show up in the library but the 10,000 Maniacs 'Hope Chest' album will not. Both albums are subfolders of my ~/music/10000maniacs/ directory. Jaguar Love's "Hologram Jams" album will show up, but Bad Religion's "Stranger than fiction" will not. These albums are located in their respecitve ~/music/ARTIST/ALBUM/ directories. I have cmus 2.3.3 on debian squeeze. Let me know what other information I can provide as I am not sure how to troubleshoot this.

[Justin R]

Post by Israel Byrd
Certain albums will not show up in the library windows 1 or 2, but do show
up in my .cmus/lib.pl file. I can play these tracks in the Play Queue
window, so cmus can read them. It seems to be a property of entire albums,
either all tracks are shown in the library or none are. There is no <No
Name> group listed, and id3 -l showed all tags are present on these files
anyway. For example, 10,000 Maniacs 'The Wishing Chair' album will show up
in the library but the 10,000 Maniacs 'Hope Chest' album will not. Both
albums are subfolders of my ~/music/10000maniacs/ directory. Jaguar Love's
"Hologram Jams" album will show up, but Bad Religion's "Stranger than
fiction" will not. These albums are located in their respecitve
~/music/ARTIST/ALBUM/ directories. I have cmus 2.3.3 on debian squeeze.
Let me know what other information I can provide as I am not sure how to
troubleshoot this.
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Look for incomplete information in ID3v1 tags and for any ID3v2
extended tags. I'm not sure why, but cmus will organize by some
strange tags sometimes. I would need to do a lot of reading to figure
it out precisely, but I've had a lot of trouble with cmus organizing
based on extended tags.

Alternatively, you could strip these useless tags using something like
'puddletag'.

[yawfle]

Post by Justin R
Look for incomplete information in ID3v1 tags and for any ID3v2
extended tags. I'm not sure why, but cmus will organize by some
strange tags sometimes. I would need to do a lot of reading to figure
it out precisely, but I've had a lot of trouble with cmus organizing
based on extended tags.

To be specific, there's an ugly mess involving the TPE2 frame in ID3v2 tags, as discussed here:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=85165

To summarize, TPE2 was intended to provide extended ("Band/orchestra/accompaniment") information about the primary *track* artist listed in TPE1:

http://id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames

HOWEVER, it was decided somewhere along the way to start using it not for track-specific info of any sort, but as an "albumartist" frame, since the ID3v2 spec didn't provide one of those, and everybody seemed to want one. Right or wrong, this has become a de facto standard behavior for both players AND tag writers (Easytag does this, for instance). Apparently some players have resorted to some heuristic voodoo to determine how the tag is being used, but I'm pretty sure cmus doesn't, so if any of your files have technically correct info in that frame (band members, etc) they will be sorted by that info as "albumartist". I've taken to stripping that frame from all of my files, myself, just to avoid the confusion. Anyway, something you might want to check... :)

[Justin R]

Post by yawfle
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=85165
http://id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames
HOWEVER, it was decided somewhere along the way to start using it not for track-specific info of any sort, but as an "albumartist" frame, since the ID3v2 spec didn't provide one of those, and everybody seemed to want one. Right or wrong, this has become a de facto standard behavior for both players AND tag writers (Easytag does this, for instance). Apparently some players have resorted to some heuristic voodoo to determine how the tag is being used, but I'm pretty sure cmus doesn't, so if any of your files have technically correct info in that frame (band members, etc) they will be sorted by that info as "albumartist". I've taken to stripping that frame from all of my files, myself, just to avoid the confusion. Anyway, something you might want to check... :)
--
yawfle

yawfle:
Same. Pulling out TPE1 and TPE2 displays albums more clearly in
cmus for me. I haven't made any changes to default config.

Israel:
Perhaps try stripping TPE1 and TPE2 from your sample set and then run
:update-cache and see if they are organized any better. Otherwise
close cmus, and delete your ~/.cmus/cache file and add the albums
again.