Album Artist but no Album

[msknight]

Latest MA version on Home Assistant.
Many moons ago, when I was troubleshooting, I was getting log errors of the type that, Album Artist not found so assuming Artist. After that, I started recording the album artist the same as the artist in cases when they weren't various.
However, I noticed recently that my "Reconcile Duplicate Albums" background tasks was starting to fail and even on debug level logging was failing to give anything after the failed: ...

2026-11-11 13:29:05 INFO [music_assistant.tasks] Task started
2026-11-11 13:29:05 DEBUG [music_assistant.metadata] Updating metadata for Album The Zombies
2026-11-11 13:29:05 ERROR [music_assistant.tasks] Task failed: 
2026-11-11 13:29:05 WARNING [music_assistant.tasks] Background task Reconcile duplicate albums failed: 

On examining, I think that this is because they are 7" singles and as such don't belong to an album. So I have an album artist set, but no tag for an album.

NOTE - this is a suspicion on what I'm observing, I don't know this is what's happening for a fact.

On the face of it, I'm sort of caught. If the system is going to fill the logs with notices that it's taking artist because there is no album artist... but when I fill in album artist, it causes the duplicate album routine to fail... I'm not sure how to proceed with this.

I do feel that there should be a check in the duplicate album, that if the album is empty, then ignore it... but that's just me... so I thought I'd ask here.

[OzGav]

Your singles aren’t the cause. A track with no album tag never creates an album in Music Assistant, so it can’t be picked up by the “Reconcile duplicate albums” task. Setting the album artist was the right call, and it has no effect on that task. Keep tagging the way you are.

The fallback log messages only appear for tracks that do have an album tag but no album artist, and only once per folder. If you still see a lot of them, they point to album folders that are missing the album artist tag, not to your singles.

The “The Zombies” error is most likely a temporary failure while looking up metadata for that one album online (for example a timeout from MusicBrainz). Those errors often arrive with no message text, which is why the log line stops after the album name. It’s harmless, the album stays as it is and the task tries again on a later run.

If it keeps failing for the same album, please set the log level to debug, run the “Reconcile duplicate albums” task again, and post the log lines around the error. At debug level the full error is logged, so we can see what’s actually going wrong. It would also help to know whether “The Zombies” is a real album in your library (they have a self-titled one) or something else.

[msknight]

This concerns a lone track which has no album. It is the song, "Black Beauty" by Kaempfert and didn't come on an album. I'm actually sat here, wondering how it assigned that to an album at all.

[OzGav]

Thanks the problem is clear now. Our local files documentation lists the album tag as mandatory, so the first step is to give your singles an album tag. A common convention is to use the song title as the album name, e.g. album “Black Beauty”.

“Black Beauty” seems to have carried that compilation’s album tags at some point, and Music Assistant kept the old album link after the tags changed. That’s a bug on our side, and so is the reconcile task crashing on it. We’ll fix both. In the meantime, to clean up:

• Add the album tag to the single(s).
• In Music Assistant, open “Salute Grt Amer. Artists/Happy Feeling” and remove it from your library. This also removes its tracks from the library (not from disk).
• Run a sync of your local files. The tracks come back with their new album.
• Run “Reconcile duplicate albums” again. If it stops at another album (e.g. “Brown Sauce”), repeat for that one.

[msknight]

One other thing that I noticed during my sorting of my music.

As you might remember with me, I have a large collection going back decades to the time before tagging existed and I'm using MA to sort things out, properly tag things, etc. and I have folders with artists and all the tracks are sitting in the same artist folder.

So... I am going through properly tagging and creating album folders, and then moving the files into those folders.

If I forget to remove the original entries from MA before I do a rescan... the new files are scanned and then somehow also associated with unconnected artists. I then have to find all occurrences of the files, remove them from MA and rescan again.

My preference is to live with this while you fix the bugs, rather than go through my collection and assign tracks to non-existent albums :-) My mother has quite the collection of 7" singles from her younger days.

[OzGav]

It is very tricky trying to manage these sorts of cases. Fixing it properly is involved, so for now what you’re already doing is correct:

• Before moving or re-tagging a batch of files, remove the affected tracks (or their artist/album) from the Music Assistant library.
• Move and tag the files.
• Run a sync. The tracks come back fresh, with the new tags.

Removing a track from the library also clears its favourite status and play history, so re-favourite anything you want to keep afterwards.

On the singles, I’ve fixed the crash in “Reconcile duplicate albums” when a file has no album tag (music-assistant/server#7548). That fix also makes sure that when a file’s album tag is changed or removed, the old album link gets dropped on the next sync. All those singles won’t break anything once that’s released.

[msknight]

Thanks for getting on to that one so fast. I appreciate it.

It's more what happens when I forget to remove the affected tracks, and what happens after that is a concern. As in why they end up being attributed to other artists. "artist x with artist y" but... that's another problem for another day.