Music library simplification?
#1
This is probably an odd question, but is there any way for me to simplify how my music library works? I basically want to remove Albums entirely. My music library was enormous, and chock full of music I didn't want to listen to, so I went through it and deleted all the songs I didn't enjoy. This generally meant all the CD's I'd bought Back When CD's Were A Thing were all purchased because of one song on the album, so there were some 13x more songs than I actually wanted to listen to. Add in random iTunes purchases and various downloaded songs, and it's pretty much a mess.

Now, see, I'm not in any way a music geek. I just want to be able to easily listen to music on my HTPC, and more importantly I want my wife to be able to easily build playlists and listen to music, and her tolerance for dealing with such things is very limited.

Is there any simple solution to remove all references to albums in XMBC? No Artist>Album>Song stepping, just Artist>Song? All my files are named that way (Artist - Song.mp3), but most (though not all) still have the album in the tags.

Or, is there an third party solution that is first and foremost simple and easy to use? In my experience, everything I've found is both extremely complex and focussed entirely on albums.

Perhaps even just a easy to manage method to make playlists for XBMC on our local PC's, then send them to be played by XBMC?
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#2
AirPlay (wiki) to the HTPC and control everything from iTunes on your desktops.
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#3
When I have several stray singles from one artist, I re-tag them all with a new album name such as "John Hiatt Compilation". This way you can just select that album for all the artists songs, but can still have other albums as well.


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#4
Yeah, I'm not really interested in albums at all. Airplay, though, may be the way to make it work for the wife. iTunes, despite being possibly the worst software ever forced on millions of people, is simple to manage. Sad to have to be outside of XBMC though.

Yeah, set up the airplay sharing, and I'll just go with that. It's too bad, because I'd love to have my full music library in XMBC in a good way, but it's really rough compared to the movie/tv show support.

Unfortunately, setting up airplay sharing was enormously more difficult than I expected - Apparently, even with bonjour installed(or for that matter, all of iTunes), XBMC won't show up as a valid airplay target under windows without an intermediate layer such as Shairport4w. Was extremely frustrating until I found that little footnote in the wiki regarding the lack of windows support.
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#5
Kill the album tag and they'll all show up under Singles (can't recall if that's filtered by artist - I presume it is). If so, link directly to it and there you have it.

Music library customisation will hopefully be coming later this year.
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#6
My folder is such a mess with stuff ripped from hundreds of different sources with bad tags, underscores and artist+title in the name instead of the tag, and only half have album info. So i just gave up. Installed Youtube plugin. Made a new Youtube account just for music with playlists in all the different genres. And just started searching and adding based on my old music folder.

So now i have skippable Mtv that actually plays music instead of Cribs or OC Choppers.
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#7
...That's a really, really good idea, MassIV. I think I'll do just that.

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Music library simplification?0