Fixing duplicate artist names in local FLAC files played by Spotify
Spotify has a bug where it’ll duplicate artist names if they’re listed more than once in the metadata of a FLAC file (e.g., in the Artist and Album Artist fields). See below:
This has been a problem since at least 2022 - see this Spotify Community post by yule from 2022-11-09 - so I doubt it’s going to be fixed. This bug doesn’t occur with MP3s; only FLAC files.
To fix it, you can remove some of the ‘artist’ fields. To easily do this for a bunch of songs at once, you can use the MP3Tag program, which is freeware by Florian Heidenreich. You can find the project (and Windows binaries) at mp3tag.de. There’s also a Winget package available:
~
❯ winget search mp3tag
Name Id Version Match Source
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mp3tag 9NN77TCQ1NC8 Unknown msstore
Mp3TagCleaner 9PB9BXXB3QL7 Unknown msstore
Mp3tag FlorianHeidenreich.Mp3tag 3.3 ProductCode: mp3tag winget
~ took 2s
❯ winget install FlorianHeidenreich.Mp3tag
Found Mp3tag [FlorianHeidenreich.Mp3tag] Version 3.30
This application is licensed to you by its owner.
Microsoft is not responsible for, nor does it grant any licenses to, third-party packages.
Downloading https://download.mp3tag.de/mp3tagv330-x64-setup.exe
██████████████████████████████ 4.97 MB / 4.97 MB
Successfully verified installer hash
Starting package install...
The installer will request to run as administrator. Expect a prompt.
Successfully installed
~ took 8s
❯
To use MP3Tag, you can either point it at a directory or selection of audio files:
Select them all, then blank the Artist fields:
Then, hop back over to Spotify, and reload your local library to force a rescan.