Roughly a little more than a year ago I noticed that select tracks from compilations ignored my metadata and opted to treat them as a single track.
To give more detail. I am an avid music collector and have many albums that are not genuinely a compilation. I have “fixed” metadata to treat the album as a single collection of tracks under a single “artist” name. In some cases these are scores/soundtracks that I wish to keep as the movie title as the “album artist” name and leaving each track as the artist. Also there are times were a guest artist is featured on the artist name where I remove the guest artist and add their name to the track title.
I am one who cares more about keeping the album track integrity over being able to single out an track’s artist. When building playlists by artists, I like to keep a simple and not have to adjust parameters to comb through “artist feat, another artist”; especially when they are merely a guest vocalist on a single track.
All was good, and I was able to sort through the Artist list and everything fell in line with the metadata. Then one day, random one-off artists starting showing up in lieu of the artist name I assigned as the album artist. Checking metadata, nothing to artist, album artist or track name has changed - but the track number has been removed. Fixing it only lasts until the next time I update the library and then the track number is gone again. This then negatively affects playing the album, because it places these tracks last, if it includes them at all in the album track list. When listening to a DJ compilation, all continuity and everything they did to curate the performance is gone.
I am read other posts and questions about this. I have tried changing how the Library handles compilations. Nothing works to get it back to where I had it as the key issue is that I do not want anything handled as a compilation or as “various artists”. I want what I had for well over a decade with my SONOS until whatever update altered it. I am very detailed with my music collection and have worked to make it work for me. I am one who insists upon looking for solo artist by their last name, I don’t like Looking for David Bowie in the Ds ( I worked in a record store for too many years to change that).
So, what happened and how to I get back MY library?