iPod Cover Flow segregated into two parts BUG#6286
Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:41 am
** Spun off from this topic **
Problem: Cover Flow is segregated into two segments: Albums sorted alphabetically by Artist, the Albums tagged as "Compilation," alphabetically by title. Sometime during MM sync, albums which are NOT tagged as Part of compilation get tagged thusly (as seen in iTunes), probably because of different Artist tags in the tracks, and some with multiple artists are even displayed by the iPod as "Various Artists" (e.g. The Joshua Tree, by Various Artists).
Continuing the discussion from the above thread in which Rednroll found that eliminating Composer tags resolved jumbled album art, and also resolved Cover Flow segmentationed.
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So I backed up all 1909 tracks with the Composer tag populated, and then mass deleted the Composer tag from all. I then synced up a "new" used Nano which I'd restored to the factory setting Saturday night ... and oddly enough, Elton John Rocket Man - Number Ones (which has varied Artist tags for 2-3 of the tracks, e.g. duets with George Michael and Kiki Dee) and Robert Rich & Lisa Moskow's Yearning, are both intermingled with "Various Artists" at the end of Cover Flow.
I performed similar steps with my iPod Classic. Synced up the 1909 or so new tracks and then ejected. No change to the albums at the end of the Cover Flow, e.g. Elton John and Robert Rich & Lisa Moskow's albums intermingled with "Various Artists," as well as Steve Roach's World's Edge (which has a guest Artist on one or two tracks) and Brian Eno & John Cale's Wrong Way Up.
Then reconnected and, without syncing, Rebuilt Device Database (full). Ejected, and checked ... no changes. Same albums at the end of the Cover Flow. So ... DELETED all tracks off the iPod entirely. (Remember, it appears that you made changes to every one of your tracks by editing the Composer tag, hence every track would be resynced to your iPod.) Then re-synced all tracks normally and ejected.
NO Composer tags at all. Still the ordering problem.
Next step ... edit the "Compilation" tag on the Nano with iTunes, and then correct album art as you did.... That's for another night.
Problem: Cover Flow is segregated into two segments: Albums sorted alphabetically by Artist, the Albums tagged as "Compilation," alphabetically by title. Sometime during MM sync, albums which are NOT tagged as Part of compilation get tagged thusly (as seen in iTunes), probably because of different Artist tags in the tracks, and some with multiple artists are even displayed by the iPod as "Various Artists" (e.g. The Joshua Tree, by Various Artists).
Continuing the discussion from the above thread in which Rednroll found that eliminating Composer tags resolved jumbled album art, and also resolved Cover Flow segmentationed.
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_________________________davidbspalding wrote:... As I said, when I had MM rebuild the database, not just "new tracks" but "all track changes" as per NoHitter151's sync guide, it indeed fixed image problems, but introduced the anomaly in which all "Compilations" (many improperly shown as compilations) to the end of Cover Flow. We were discussing that not too long ago.Rednroll wrote:... The problem is probably within the iPod's database and how the database is managed when updates are made to it. The 1st time you write to the database on the iPod all the information is written to the database at the same time. When you sync changes, it updates those specific sections of the database. That seems to be where the problem is at. Rebuilding the device database does exactly that....it scans through everything on your iPod and "Rebuilds" the entire database.davidbspalding wrote:After having MM rebuild the database, all the album art is back.
SO is the problem of the segmented Cover Flow. Re-enabling display of Compilations, the albums as before appear. Sure looks like MM is the culprit....
If that's no longer a concern, my mistake. That's what my troubleshooting has been towards. My mistake if I wasn't making that clearer.
.Remember when I suggested that it would be a good idea if MM had an "Option" in the preferences where you could enable this option and have MM "Rebuild the device database" after the sync was complete? Let me remind you of your reply. Now that you seem to finally be coming up to speed as to why I suggested that because you're finally realizing that "rebuild the device database" seems to fix most of these problems.
Rebuilding the database fixes some of these problems, but it hasn't always corrected jumbled images -- on occasion, I've had to delete the album from the device entirely.
And again, rebuilding the database restores the haphazard (sort of) clumping of albums as "compilations" without regard to the actual artist tags. Coheed and Cambria's Good Apollo I'm burning.... doesn't belong at the end of your Cover Flow under any circumstances that I can fathom. And that appears to be a problem that MM is introducing, as syncing with Itunes eradicated this anomaly in my case. (NO albums are tagged as compilations.)
As I was saying back then, the MM database rebuild marks albums as compilations (or the iPod firmware makes that change based on database indications), which is what results in Cover Flow being in two segments. Checking the albums through iTunes, every album in the second segment had the "Part of compilation" bit set to YES, and this bit is set to NO in all the albums in my library. Your suggested option to rebuild the database on each sync may fix album art issues. But I don't see how the Coheed and Cambria album is now in sequence, unless it was a different anomaly than the "Compilation" bit....Rednroll wrote:davidbspalding wrote:Um ,,, please, NO option to rebuild database on every sync. That's excessive for something you can do manually as needed. ...
But ... I have to also been wracking my brains trying to understand teh iPod logic for handling things like "Artist1 & Artist2" and "Artist1; Artist2" in <Album Artist> and <Artist> tags. I found that both artists only show up with "Artist1 & Artist2" as <AA>, the IPod treats them as a single entry. Cover Flow ... just baffles me. It's like it shows a limited subset of all the albums. I dunno why I spent so much time tracking down (or scanning) covers for my obscure CDs, as Cover Flow becomes less useful each day. (When I have 1000 CDs ripped and synced, I imagine Cover Flow could take too much time to find a single album.)
I'm glad your concerns are resolved. Really. The thread is about "Ipod sync issue with PICS," so I'll accept that the Cover Flow/Compilations issue is a sidebar,... and a topic for another thread. It's an aggravation to me that renders Cover Flow useless.....
Gotcha. That's the issue I'm investigating as well.Rednroll wrote:Clearing the Composer tags clean, did not fix my album art issues. It seemed to fix the Album order problems in the Cover Flow screen like this issue.
Hrm. Actually, replace "Composer tag" in your narrative with "Compilation tag" in mine, and that's exactly what I saw when I used iTunes to remove the Compilation bit. This... gives me an idea-r.... My thought process, is that the composer tag is some how causing data within the database of the iPod to be "shifted" where it some how causes the album art to get screwed up and assigned to the wrong album. So After you remove the composer tags, the next step is to fix what the composer tag broke the 1st time around when it existed and was written to the iPod database.
Yes it was. I'm not doing this to prove you're right. I'm applying what you've determined to the Cover Flow error I'm seeing in the hopes of resolving it as well. Don't expect that I'll have exactly the same results as you,... I don't.This wasn't clear in my original post?
Which makes it worth trying some more.....Like I said, after doing that 2 step process, I haven't noticed ANY of these strange problems that I have run across yet.
Not a bad idea, I just thought of how I can use MM to backup all those with Composer tag values, (AutoOrganize, "Copy"), then edit those.If you don't want to experiment and whipe out the composer tags, then just make a back up copy of your entire library 1st. If you find it doesn't work, then just restore the back up copies of all your media files.
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So I backed up all 1909 tracks with the Composer tag populated, and then mass deleted the Composer tag from all. I then synced up a "new" used Nano which I'd restored to the factory setting Saturday night ... and oddly enough, Elton John Rocket Man - Number Ones (which has varied Artist tags for 2-3 of the tracks, e.g. duets with George Michael and Kiki Dee) and Robert Rich & Lisa Moskow's Yearning, are both intermingled with "Various Artists" at the end of Cover Flow.
I performed similar steps with my iPod Classic. Synced up the 1909 or so new tracks and then ejected. No change to the albums at the end of the Cover Flow, e.g. Elton John and Robert Rich & Lisa Moskow's albums intermingled with "Various Artists," as well as Steve Roach's World's Edge (which has a guest Artist on one or two tracks) and Brian Eno & John Cale's Wrong Way Up.
Then reconnected and, without syncing, Rebuilt Device Database (full). Ejected, and checked ... no changes. Same albums at the end of the Cover Flow. So ... DELETED all tracks off the iPod entirely. (Remember, it appears that you made changes to every one of your tracks by editing the Composer tag, hence every track would be resynced to your iPod.) Then re-synced all tracks normally and ejected.
NO Composer tags at all. Still the ordering problem.
Next step ... edit the "Compilation" tag on the Nano with iTunes, and then correct album art as you did.... That's for another night.
I'm following up with an enhancement request to override this, or not, at the user's discretion. I still think it's a bug that MM does this without a decision by the user. 