I suppose you have both explored restoring a library backup (JRiver keeps a few of these depending on your configuration). As Album Artist tends to get written to the file tags after editing, I would re-select the files in question and in Library tools use Update Tags from Library. If by miracle the "bad data" hasn't been written to the file, you could use the tool in reverse to update library from the tags. Probably not a solution I fear.
Somehow for all my .dsf files my Album Artist tag has duplicated the names of every album artist. For instance, "Queen" is now "Queen / Queen". I don't know how this happened but I suspect it was because I used foobar 2000 to remove extraneous extra tag information and perhaps foobar changed them.
This affects quite a number of entries. I could do each one individually, but is there an easier way, perhaps a function I could use, that would edit all the album artist entries and tell it to remove the "/" and the space in front as well as everything after the "/"?
Thanks in advance.
the function removeright(...) would work, but not sure it would be at all practical eg. if you type
over in the albumartist field
=removeright([Album Artist], 8)
it would strip "Queen / Queen" to "Queen". The problem is if the number of characters are smaller or larger than the variable, "8" in this example, it would strip away to much or two little. So this would still take time
Afraid I'm adding to this request rather than offering a fix - recently I discovered that around 50% of my more than 40,000 tracks have had the album artist duped - but in my case as (eg) "The Beatles; The Beatles" No idea how it happened, and therefore whether it it likely to spread or re-occur.
I can't yet work whether it is anything more than a nuisance, but would love to know if there is any solution more efficient than setting up a smart list for all files where 'Album Artist' contains '; ', then fixing it manually album by album - VERY time consuming!
I can't even test this for you as the semi-colon is the separator for multiple artists (or any field for that matter) and JRiver is not accepting a repeated artist. Possible that you could create a list field, but not sure -- the idea being to parse out the second album artist to a temporary field for editing .. maybe someone else has an idea about this.
Now another way which might help both of you IF (and only if) the artist field should be the same as the album artist field you cold over type into the album artist field
=[Artist]
; this would overrwrite the Album Artist with the Artist name and works on multiple selections. Compilation Albums are not an issue in htat you can select them all and just Type in Various Artist (or what ever you use) after selecting them all
If any of this can be adapted to your situations, use prudence and don't depends on CTRL+Z to save your butts. Select a few of the tracks and test before selecting 40,000 and entering an expression. ALWAYS do a manual backup of the JR library file before playing around. A restore takes seconds, manually retagging takes mucho time , euh well you know that already.
Hope this helps
@gtandzi -- how did you do this?? if it is some freeware that is the culprit I'd stop using it or check on the config with a fine tooth comb -- the ";" is used all of the time in JRiver for a bunch of things and this could provoke a lot of issues you haven't stumbled across yet