C4 does not recognize artists by song, only by album?

I have a large cd collection, roughly 2000 albums ripped to 70 GB and 20k tracks. A lot of those are Various Artists cd's and I've noticed that even though all are meticulously tagged track by track with the correct artist for each track, in the Control4 interface they all adopt the artist of the first song on the album.

I did a search and found one other reference to this situation, but nothing about when this bug is likely to be resolved. Considering that one cannot search for a song by song title, not being able to search half my collection by artist either really does limit the accessibility of music on the system. Moreover, it's obviously an incorrect interpretation of the ID3 system.

Is this bug universal? Does it apply equally to a network share drive and to a USB drive? Does every system experience it? Does anyone have word on when will it be corrected??

While we're discussing corrections to the MP3 sort and retrieval functions, my beloved D-Link Media Lounge (which I still have on my system because it has a more robust means of searching out music) also has an option to ignore words like "A" and "THE" from the front of a song title or artist, so The Beatles, The Eagles, The Cars, The Who, etc etc do not all end up grouped together under T. That's also something I would love to see added to the next version.

--Jason

All we get is that it's "in development" - I've got my fingers crossed for the next release (Q1), but I think it's going to be the release after that (Q3 of 2008).

As big a fan as I am of Control4, this seems like a glaring oversight . . .

I can test this tonight, but do you happen to know whether it is basing the "wrong artist" information on the first track in the FOLDER or the first track in the ALBUM? The reason I ask is that the only workaround I can think of would be a pretty goofy one, which would be for an album with 8 tracks you'd essentially create 8 subfolders named 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 and 8. You'd move 1 MP3 file into each of the folders, and now it would be the only track in its folder.

If C4 is basing their artist identification on album, though, then you'd actually have to retag files to get around it, and I'm not interested in doing that.

Are there any other workarounds people have found?

Does this website help? http://blog.tleish.com/2007/05/02/my-mp3-tags/ It's from Thomas's blog,

Hmmm . . . I don't think that's directly related but it's interesting. It sounds like that post was addressing some issue of how Composer imports cover art and album information. I was not aware that Composer was modifying my MP3 tags in any way, and I have confirmed that this issue of displaying the wrong artist is not a matter of it modifying the ID3 tags, it's just a matter of Composer not reading the data from each MP3 file. the ID3 tags in the file are still correct.

Can anyone confirm what changes, if any, Composer/AMG are making to the ID3 contents? Where is cover art being stored?

--Jason

I think the cover art is being stored on the main HTC or MC running director. It then streams it to the OSD or to a MTS or 10.5".

That's how we've gotten around it - by taking compilation CD's and re-tagging them from "various" to each track as it's own album... it's a real pain and I've been one of the most vocal dealers in trying to get it changed at C4... all I can say is I think it's getting closer and closer - but it keeps getting back burnered to other newer (read: more popular) features. For example, improvements in system speed and I'm guessing, now - Internet radio (ie: Rhapsody). Don't get me wrong - I love new features - but I also think this is the one and only "old" feature that needs to be improved upon ASAP. When other dealers were asked - they mostly supported the new features as well (over fixing this)... so all I can suggest, is tell your dealers that you want this OVER something new - and hopefully that feedback will get back to C4.

So it sounds like the artist identification is by album.

That brings to mind another workaround which might be more "seamless" than your current process. I use a program called MP3 Tag Studio (http://www.magnusbrading.com/mp3ts) which is by far the most powerful and extensible MP3 Tagging program I've ever used.

It will allow you to write macros and define patterns for tagging based on various other tags.

In the case of this issue, I already have each of my tracks tagged with the correct artist (i.e. each track has a different artist) not as "Various Artists". I'm not quite sure where you're starting from when you say "re-tagging them from 'various' to each track as it's own album". As far as I know, the artist tag is a per-track tag, but I suppose you could mean that the "Artist" tag for each track on a various artists album is called "Various Artists". In that case, though, C4 would not be the problem -- no system would allow you to look up those tracks by artist (I may be horribly confused here).

In any case, MP3 Tag Studio will allow you to, for example, set the "Album" field to be equal to "Album"_"Track". That will give each track of the various artists CD it's unique album name, and so presumably it will correct the artist issue.

The upside of this approach is that, assuming you don't have underscores elsewhere in your tags, when C4 gets their act together and corrects this you'd be able to go back and truncate, with a macro, anything from "_" onward in any album title, basically restoring them back to their original state.

The downside of any implementation of giving each track its own album name is that you've essentially killed the functionality of viewing your collection by album. In my case my collection is about 2000 albums, but probably 600 of those are Various Artists. If each of those 600 contains ~12 tracks I'd be adding 6600 new albums to my listings, making scrolling through them an absurd exercise.

You could in turn reduce this problem in MP3 Tag Studio by prepending "zz_" to the album tag of any track greater than 1. So the album name of track 1 would still be "Let It Be" (or perhaps, (Best of Burt Bacharach") but the 10 tracks after that would have album names of:

zz_Let It Be_02

zz_Let It Be_03

zz_Let It Be_04

zz_Let It Be_05

etc etc etc

It would certainly help automate the process, but it's still a lot messier than C4 fixing a few lines of code . . .

--Jason

I am having similar issues

Many of the mp3 tags were incorrect when my songs got scanned into Composer. Obviously this becomes a galring error when viewing on the TV screen via the HTC. I went back into the folder where my music is and modified the tags to reflect the appropriate information but I can't get the changes to take place in the on screen displays? I hit scan and refresh but no luck.

Any ideas how I can correct these tags and get composer to update the info in the system?

Thanks

I think it's safe to say the Media Management side of C4 is quite weak and hasn't been really improved since day 1......constant frustration for most people......I do hope they get a new release with improvements here...

Dave C

Stay tuned for the Q1 release!