In the process of switching from Mac OS to Pop!_OS, I liberated my music from iTunes, and then sought a music organizer for Linux. I am in the process of trying Clementine. I found it easy to import my music, but Clementine has listed some albums under “Various Artists” that I didn’t expect to see there. I know that a single artist recorded these albums, so I want them to show up where I expect to see them.

Moving the albums into different directories didn’t change how Clementine organizes the music; Clementine uses metadata in the music files themselves to organize them by album and artist. I used Kid3 Audio Tagger to change the metadata of the affected music files. Specifically, I used the command-line interface so that I could fix all my music with a single command.

Visit https://kid3.sourceforge.io/#download for installation instructions. I installed the package named kid3-cli.

I did this:

  1. Move the real compilations to another directory somewhere out of the way, leaving a directory tree with only music that I want to mark as “not a compilation”.
  2. Go to the root of this directory tree with cd.
  3. Run this command.
$ find . -type f  -exec kid3-cli -c "set Compilation 0" {} \;

This sets the “Compilation” tag in each file to false.

Next, I rescanned the music library within Clementine and the albums appeared where I expected them to appear. This made me happy.

I then moved the compilations music directory back to where I store the rest of the music, and then rescanned the music library within Clementine once more. Of course, I could have figured out the find magic to exclude that one directory, but I didn’t feel like it. If I have to do this more than once again, then I’ll figure out then how to do that.