0011345: Blank Album Artist is changed to 'Unknown Artist' on sync - MantisBT

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0011345	MMA	Synchronization	public	2013-10-04 20:16	2013-10-18 16:28

Reporter	rusty	Assigned To
Priority	urgent	Severity	minor	Reproducibility	always
Status	closed	Resolution	fixed
Product Version	1.0.4
Target Version	1.0.4	Fixed in Version	1.0.4

Summary	0011345: Blank Album Artist is changed to 'Unknown Artist' on sync
Description	I a track that's missing Album Artist is synced (via USB or Wi-Fi), it shows 'Unknown artist' in the Album Artist field instead of nothing. This is problematic because modifications to the device's library will trigger changes in the main library upon synchronization, and metadata is liable to be modified without the user intending that to occur. i.e. many tracks will end up with 'Unknown Artist' instead of a blank field.
Tags	No tags attached.

Fixed in build	172

marek 2013-10-09 21:07 developer ~0037829 Last edited: 2013-10-09 21:08	Yes, MMA doesn't have blank artists. But I didn't find any issue. Please specify how these reproduce issues. I tried both USB and wifi sync. Unknown artist is never propagated to MMW. If you are able to reproduce it, please send log.

rusty 2013-10-10 05:19 administrator ~0037835	I didn't test this out. My assumption was that if the user changes one field (e.g. rating) then when the track is synced back to MMW, 'Unknown artist' will populate the field. BUT, even if this doesn't occur, the discrepancy in behavior is still a bug. If a field is empty, it should appear empty. If the field contains 'Unknown' then the user knows that that is what is contained within the field.

marek 2013-10-10 12:49 developer ~0037841	No it is not propagated to MMW. Only changed field is sent to MMW. Each category has it's unknown item: Unknown album, Unknown artist, Unknown album. But I see that other fields are not displayed in Properties dialog. So I am going to assign it to Martin to fix it because he was working on it.

rusty 2013-10-10 16:09 administrator ~0037847	OK, but to be clear: unknown items should be blank (i.e. the solution isn't to have all other fields show 'Unknown <field>'.

martin 2013-10-14 22:54 developer ~0037900	Fixed in build 172.

rusty 2013-10-18 16:28 administrator ~0037953	Verified 172. The only remaining issue is that 'Unknown artist' is displayed in the tracklist. However, this relatively minor, though it will likely be an issue once we add sorting and more columns to list views (in which case users will want to differentiate between 'blank' and 'Unknown'.