GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 786808
Untagged music does not appear on GNOME Music
Last modified: 2017-08-28 06:43:10 UTC
Created attachment 358415 [details] custom album I've assembled, only the "Album" characteristic is provided. Others are "Unknown" Symptoms: The application is not recognizing folders without proper tagging, such as home-made collections. Only albums that I've purchased (well organized and tagged) are being collected by GNOME Music. Expected behavior: GNOME Music should display untagged music as "Unknown Artist or Unknown Album", but definitely display them instead of keeping them out.
Created attachment 358416 [details] Album that came with proper metadata and image
Created attachment 358417 [details] Proper metadada displayed
Created attachment 358418 [details] Custom metadata I've written - only album filled and an image named "folder.jpg" inside the folder
Created attachment 358419 [details] GNOME Music not showing all the albums, missing "Ambient" for instance
After some experimentation, I've learned that GNOME Music completely ignores folders inside which there are no properly tagged audio files. If all the files inside the folder have "Unknown" title, artist and album tags, they will not show at all on GNOME Music. Adding the tags with a tag editor for at least one file inside the folder makes it appear in GNOME Music, as it should be. However, I think this shouldn't be the correct behavior.
After consideration, I came to think that the current behavior might be better as it filters out anything that's not explicitly music files. It just adds the annoying task of tagging music. If there's still a good reason not to change, it's OK to me.
Music is reliant on proper tags. However, we should have a good story for untagged music. That is something still in the works. It should at least show up in the songs view (it currently doesn't, I am aware) and in the static playlists (eg. 'recently added'), so they can at least be identified. Static playlists are however limited to 50 results. Maybe we should add a playlist 'untagged music' for now. On our roadmap is a simple tag editor (some of the code is already written #706352 ) and at some point we would like to do automated tagging. But for now our advice is: tag your music. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 706352 ***