HOW-TO use XBMC's SQL Music database

xbmc has a true music database.

this database which is using sqlite is and will be created by xbmc. its placed in xbmc\mymusic.db
it holds:
- all artists
- all genres
- all songs
- all albums
- all albuminfo
found in your oggvorbis/mp3 files

when you open up my music you'll notice the scan button. if you press this button xbmc will scan the current directory and all subdirectories for mp3/oggvorbis files.
for each file the id3/ogg tag is read, parsed and put into the mymusic database.

now the fun part, after scanning you music selection you can sort your music by artists, genres, albums or just plain files
todo this, hit the 'view songs' button.
by pressing it multiple times you cycle between
artists : browse your music collection by artist
genres : browse your music collection by genres
albums : browse your music collection by albums
songs : browse your music collection by directory

its very important that your music files contains mp3's/ogg files with correctly filled in id3/ogg tags. only then will the music database work

album art from http://www.allmusic.com
another nice thing is looking up the album art.
remember the imdb lookup from xbmp?
well album art is the same thing for your music files. just
press the white button (or remote info) when the cursor is on a music file and xbmc will lookup all information & download a thumbnail from www.allmusic.com

offcourse your xbox needs 2b connected to the internet to use this feature.



frodo

does xbmc pick up album art that is stored as a tag within the mp3 file as well? that would be nice.

Quote:does xbmc pick up album art that is stored as a tag within the mp3 file as well? that would be nice.

no, i didnt knew this is possible? can you gimme an url which explains this?

frodo

(frodo @ oct. 01 2003,13:30 Wrote:

Quote:does xbmc pick up album art that is stored as a tag within the mp3 file as well? that would be nice.

no, i didnt knew this is possible? can you gimme an url which explains this?

i don't know much about this either but here is a win32 util (link) that does it (think written in c#)

nearly all mp3 tag editing tools allow you to store album art within the mp3 file as a tag. i use http://www.musicmatch.com but you can download nearly any tag editing program and it will work. in fact i have all my album art stored within my mp3 files and hence i wrote a program to extract the album art in a format suitable for xbmp thumbnails. the program i wrote is available at http://mp3imagetagextr.sourceforge.net/ .

while you are looking at this feature just keep in mind that most tag editing programs can also store lyrics as tags and it would be cool to also be able to display this in xbmc.

for a general overview on mp3 tags look at: http://www.id3.org/

if you want some help on code on how to extract the album art you can take a look at my code. its in java but you will get the idea.

here is all the information that is needed for id3 tags:

id3.org

-eric

i have made some code in python that could put a jpg or png picture in a file containing a id3v2 tag. you just open the image as a stream and copy the img data in the apic frame of the id3 tag. thats it.

d oyou have to scan the files before the white button trick will work?! i have tried the white button time and time again but it does not work!

Quote:does xbmc pick up album art that is stored as a tag within the mp3 file as well? that would be nice.

no, i didnt knew this is possible? can you gimme an url which explains this?

frodo - if you are interested, one of the best application as a music server is the server application used by the slimp3 player. the application is perl and open source. it does retreive and display the album art from the information embeded in the file's id3 tag, when there. they have also developped the slim server to look in the folder containing the files for the art as a jpeg.

i am sure if you search the archives of the dev list, you will find much more about this.

http://www.slimp3.com

ciao.

i know that xbmc plays .wma files. a while ago i started to turn all my mp3 music collection and my cd collection (i still have 80 albums to go... ) to .wma files because i like the sound quality better than mp3 at the same bitrate. i use the newest wmp to create the .wma files and i also just like san9jay have stored album art and information in the .wma files only my problem is that when i play the files using both the xbmc and xbmp i don't see shit. only the file name. is it in the xbmc and xbmp not possible to show tag info that is inside the .wma file or did i do something wrong??thnx