Serviio

I have Serviio Pro v2.3 and have been using for years for Movies and Series (Video sources)

I have recently added several albums (music source) and noticed something odd in the (ALBUMS, artists, folders) categorization Serviio applies. Is it a bug?..

The .mp3 files have metadata containing among other things, the artist and album (name) which is inserted by the program creating the file. You can view or change this metadata in Windows by right clicking on the file and selecting properties -> details.

Most of my albums had a single artist, but others had different artists for different tracks.

I noticed that Serviio, when accessed as a media server using my Roku, or windows PC would create multiple music "Albums" with the same name- one for each artist. So as an example, there were three "Albums" for "Bing and Frank Christmas"; one where the artist was "Bing", one for "Frank: and one for "Bing and Frank".

I was able to move a single file from the "Bing and Frank Christmas" (Artist="Bing") album to the "Bing and Frank Christmas" (Artist="Bing and Frank") album by changing the artist in the file's properties.

To me this seems like a bug. Perhaps I can live with it because my music collection is small, and I don't need to search by artist, so I can delete that property from the .mp3 files for albums containing multiple artists. But before doing so, thought I'd post here to see if anyone has a better idea.

Thanks!

I found a "workaround" for the issue posted, which I assume is a bug or a "feature" used to identify unique album names.

While experimenting with the .mp3 file metadata using Mp3Tag software (https://www.mp3tag.de/en/), I noticed that there is an "Album Artist" tag on the files and this tag was blank in all the files in the "Bing and Frank Christmas" Directory/Album. So using that software, I changed the blank "Album Artist" to be "Bing and Frank".

The result was that now, instead of having 3 "Albums" in the Serviio "Audio - Albums" called "Bing and Frank Christmas" (one for each "Artist"), I now only had one. And all the music, whether recorded by Bing, Frank, or Bing and Frank as artists was all there. I assume that the algorithm that examines metadata and places audio files in an "Album" first looks at the "Album" tag, then the "Album artist" and "Artist" tags. Perhaps it does this to create unique Albums assuming two Artists can use the same name for their albums. And if it can't find an "Album Artist" it uses the "Artist" tag. Anyway, changing the blank "Album Artist" to be anything non-blank (ie I used "Various Artists" for some albums) fixes the issue.

So If it were my algorithm, I would only use the "Album Artist" to determine "uniquness". If two albums had the same "Name", separate albums would require the "Album Atrist" to be different.