Vista MCE & Music Album Mess :-/

alienandy

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I have been running my new Vista Media Centre now for a week or so. Well impressed with it. I do have a couple of 'niggles' mind.

The first is my Music albums. Quite some time ago I used a programme called CD Audio Extractor to rip all my cds to mp3s. Took me ages doing it. However I thought that once I had the Media Centre up and running, that I would be able to pick an album and play it! Yeh right. Why is it that when I look at the albums shown in the Media Centre it has split loads of them apart. i.e. Blondie - The Best Of with 1 track instead of 12 or so! What is happening? Why is Media Center not keeping all the correct songs together? I store my albums on the HD like so....

C:\mp3\Blondie\The Best Of\*.mp3
C:\mp3\Blondie\Autoamerican\*.mp3
etc.etc.

The 2nd niggle is that I am unable to list my Videos in a 'text list' view. It's all very nice having thumbnails, but you cannot instantly see what you have!

Can anyone help with any of the above?

TIA.

Andy.
 
Why is it that when I look at the albums shown in the Media Centre it has split loads of them apart. i.e. Blondie - The Best Of with 1 track instead of 12 or so! What is happening? Why is Media Center not keeping all the correct songs together? I store my albums on the HD like so....

C:\mp3\Blondie\The Best Of\*.mp3
C:\mp3\Blondie\Autoamerican\*.mp3
etc.etc.

You physical layout is fine, it's the descriptive embedded tags that have been added (or not) to your MP3 files, either as part of your original rip or since by other applications, that are the problem. Media Center uses Media Player underneath to organise stuff, and it's very sensitive to tag differences* - if you examine the tags in the files for a single album, say The Best Of, you'll find that you'll have some inconsistancies e.g. the BAND tag existing for some files, but not others. There are lots of tag editors, lost of which automate sorting this sort of mess out for you - everyone has their favourite, but I like the simplicity of MP3 Tag (although, with that, you might have a long laborious job ahead of you).

* It's also a pain in the arse itself for messing about with your tag contents, album art etc. - personally I manually sorted all of the issues with my tags, set WMP to not update anything from the internet, and then made my files read only, but even then it can still bugger about stuffing its own versions of album art everywhere.
 
Just to add to the last post iirc MCE/WMP uses the "Album Artist" field (not the "Artist" field) in the tags to sort from. If this info is missing or erroneous it can cause all kinds of strange sorting problems.

I haven't had to run it for a while but there is an application called Album Art Fixer, which may take some of the pain out of tagging your collection properly, but the safest way is to manually edit the tags yourself.
 
Thanks for your help on this guys.:smashin:
Ahhh s**t, I just knew that I was looking at a long winded job here. Never mind. It'll be worth it in the end!

I have downloaded that program mate, thanks for that. Much appreciated.

Will MCE automatically re-organise this mp3 albums next time I boot it up, or do I need to do anything?
 
When I have made tag changes the effect in Mediaplayer/MCE is almost immediate, although this depends on the size of your library size and whether the files are local or on a server.

Adding new files and changing art can take a few minutes for example.

The best way to see what effect you are having is to edit some tags in Mediaplayer (right click the song and select Advanced Tag Editor) and make some changes. You will find the song maybe relocated straight away dependant on what you are latering.

Hope that helps.
 
When I have made tag changes the effect in Mediaplayer/MCE is almost immediate, although this depends on the size of your library size and whether the files are local or on a server.

Adding new files and changing art can take a few minutes for example.

Opposite experience for me. In fact, a few times I've had to deliberately recreate the WMP library after making changes (by bringing up and applying the monitored folders section on the Library tab) so that they were picked.
 
Just to add to the last post iirc MCE/WMP uses the "Album Artist" field (not the "Artist" field) in the tags to sort from. If this info is missing or erroneous it can cause all kinds of strange sorting problems.

Actually, that's interesting. Although I was aware of the sensitivities of MCE and WMP with tags, it looks like I've completely missed all the issues with the "Album Artist" tag - now that I've Googled about, I can see, as you say, the whole importance of it to MCE/WMP and all the issues folk have had with it. However, here's the thing :) : absolutely none of my files are tagged with "Album Artist" - I tag using CDex from CDs using CDDB with CDex' "ID3-V1 and ID2-V2" option on. I have "Album" and "Artist" set, but no "Album Artist". My sorted display in XP MCE and WMP11 seems to be fine, although I did find issues with some albums where some files had an extended BAND tag and others without - so now I add BAND manually post-rip in CDex.

I'm wondering why I don't see sorting/other issues here, and whether I'm missing out in some other way or whether it would just be wise to retrospectively add "Album Artist". I guess what I can say is that, as above, I find WMP very slow in picking up changes/additions of albums, and sometimes I have to resort to recreating the whole library again. It seemed unlikely to me that this is related to "Album Artist", but now I'm not so sure...
 
Actually, that's interesting. Although I was aware of the sensitivities of MCE and WMP with tags, it looks like I've completely missed all the issues with the "Album Artist" tag - now that I've Googled about, I can see, as you say, the whole importance of it to MCE/WMP and all the issues folk have had with it. However, here's the thing :) : absolutely none of my files are tagged with "Album Artist" - I tag using CDex from CDs using CDDB with CDex' "ID3-V1 and ID2-V2" option on. I have "Album" and "Artist" set, but no "Album Artist". My sorted display in XP MCE and WMP11 seems to be fine, although I did find issues with some albums where some files had an extended BAND tag and others without - so now I add BAND manually post-rip in CDex.

I'm wondering why I don't see sorting/other issues here, and whether I'm missing out in some other way or whether it would just be wise to retrospectively add "Album Artist". I guess what I can say is that, as above, I find WMP very slow in picking up changes/additions of albums, and sometimes I have to resort to recreating the whole library again. It seemed unlikely to me that this is related to "Album Artist", but now I'm not so sure...

Just to confuse us all, BAND is another name for the Album Artist tag.

regards,
Paul
 
Just to confuse us all, BAND is another name for the Album Artist tag.

regards,
Paul

Aha! I guess that explains why BAND shows up in MP3Tag etc. but (as I've just discovered) the Advanced tag edit in WMP shows "Album Artist"...and I thought I had finally got fully to grips with this :) .
 
I had this problem too, used iTunes to rip a lot of stuff and it was all a mess. Random tracks were in .aac and once converted to .mp3 had the wrong names etc.

Decided it was easier just to rip it all again, taken me about 8 hours so far. Then ive got to go through the stuff i bought from the iTunes music store and :rolleyes: well i dont really need to go into what im doing with those
 

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