Bug or user error? Albums appear multiple times

[RobFreundlich]

Albums are appearing multiple times in WinAmp Android's Albums view.

The songs for a given album all have the Album Artist tag set to the same value, and Artist set to the actual artist. I got the music onto my phone (a Droid X) via a USB connection and WinAmp Desktop's "manage portable device" feature. The file structure it created is /sdcard/Music/Artist/Album/Track - Title.mp3

What I'm seeing is that an Album in the Album List seems to be a combination of Artist and Album Title, where I'm expecting it to use Album Artist and Album Title, like WinAmp Desktop does.

So, for example, for real-world album The Beatles (White Album), I see two listings in Album View:


The Beatles (White Album) - artist The Beatles
The Beatles (White Album) - artist Nicky Hopkins/The Beatles


All songs in the album have Album Artist set to "The Beatles", but the Artist for the song "Revolution 1" is set to "Nicky Hopkins/The Beatles" instead of "The Beatles" like the rest of the songs.


It's not clear to me whether the error comes from the app using the Artist tag or from my folder structure.

Am I missing something? Is there a setting somewhere I can tweak to make this do what I want?

[RobFreundlich]

With some more research, I found the answer to this. Apparently, the Android Media Library uses the folder structure instead of the ID3 tags (or possibly in conjunction with them) when deciding what the Album for a song is. I restructured my library (using the WinAmp Desktop Media Organizer Plugin) to use Album Artist instead of Artist in folder naming (so my structure is now /sdcard/Music/Album Artist/Album/Track - Title.mp3), deleted the Music directory on my Droid, and copied it back across from the PC (using Windows Explorer rather than WinAmp's USB sync, since that was so amazingly slow).

After that, I went into Settings/Apps/Manage Apps/Music, cleared data, and opened WinAmp Android. When it was done rescanning, it showed the correct Album list.

So, problem solved!