The WiiM Home app does not group all tracks of the same album

[Djinn]

Hi,
I have a WiiM Ultra updated to the latest firmware version and the WHA is updated on my Android phone too. When I plug an USB pendrive to the USB port of the Ultra with ONLY ONE album (compilation with various artists) I get the following:



Notice the album counter! 54 in total! (it should be 1, logically).

This is the tag information of the album according to TagScanner:



Also notice that this is a multidisc compilation (3 discs in total).

Why is this happening? Which fields should I add or remove to make the app group all tracks in one album?

Thanks for any help.

 

[simbun]

It appears to be a bug, as discussed here.

I'd suggest submitting a bug report through the WiiM Home app (More > Send feedback) so they know it's not an isolated incident.

 

[Steve Woodhouse]

Actually, it appears it’s as simple as the WiiM’s system supporting ‘artist’ but not ‘album artist’ tags.

They’ve just said they’re correcting that later this month.

 

[simbun]

Actually, it appears it’s as simple as the WiiM’s system supporting ‘artist’ but not ‘album artist’ tags.

It's a bug. It's currently using the Artist tag for both track and album roles.

 

[Steve Woodhouse]

It's a bug. It's currently using the Artist tag for both track and album roles.

I'm not sure where one would draw the line. I think a 'bug' is something that's not supposed to be there, an unintended issue caused by something else.

In this instance, I think they must have made a conscious decision not to include the reading of album artist tags. A bug would be if it was designed to read them but isn't.

But that's just semantics, I suppose.

The bottom line is, the reason this shows up as different albums is due to a lack of reading of the album artist tags, and that they're including the ability to read those later this month.

 

[simbun]

But that's just semantics, I suppose.

Exactly.

All we really know for sure is that a field in the database that used to hold the AlbumArtist tag now holds the Artist tag, and that's only by comparing the MiniDLNA database to that of the WiiM, everything else is conjecture.

It's likely that a small, well intended fix caused this breaking change and regression testing (if it exists) didn't pick it up. We've seen this a lot in the past.

 

[Steve Woodhouse]

Exactly.

All we really know for sure is that a field in the database that used to hold the AlbumArtist tag now holds the Artist tag, and that's only by comparing the MiniDLNA database to that of the WiiM, everything else is conjecture.

It's likely that a small, well intended fix caused this breaking change and regression testing (if it exists) didn't pick it up. We've seen this a lot in the past.

Apart from, album artist, what other criteria would people like WiiM to add?

 

[Djinn]

Apart from, album artist, what other criteria would people like WiiM to add?

I think it would be better for the WHA to look for the AlbumArtist (or Album Artist) field first and, if it is present (and populated), the app should use that field instead of the Artist field. That way, if the AlbumArtist/Album Artist field is not present (nor populated), the app would use the Artist field to categorise (group) the album. Note that there are tag formats such as ID3v1 that do not have the AlbumArtist/Album Artist field (but do have the Artist field) and it is important not to break backwards compatibility with these older formats.

I think this would be a good way to address this issue without breaking anything. Let's see what the Engineering Team says...

 

[simbun]

Apart from, album artist, what other criteria would people like WiiM to add?

All the core tags are covered they just need to use them appropriately.

I don't have an Amp/Ultra but I did spend a couple of hours with a friend's (about 6 months ago) and the only issues I remember where with multi-value Artist and Genre tags - AlbumArtist too but that's not very widely supported anyway.