Help with Music Library
#1
Firstly, thanks to all the developers - I'm a new user, I upgraded from a hardware streamer to a PC and XMBC to play my movies and I'm really loving the extra facilities.

I've been experimenting with the Music section and I'm having some problems with the library:

I have around 1500 albums on an external drive connected via USB to my HTPC. The main folder is "Music", within which are two folders "Flac Music" and "MP3 Music". Within each folder there is a subfolder per artist and in each artist folder are subfolders for each album.

ie:

For my flac albums the path is: E:\Music\Flac Music\*Artist*\*Album*\*songs*.mp3

and for mp3 E:\Music\MP3 Music\*Artist*\*Album*\*songs*.mp3

After I pointed XMBC to the source E:\Music and updated the library (using the 'Universal' add-on) I noticed some duplicates in the Artist view - mostly things like a thumbnail for "The Beatles" and one for "Beatles" - which I traced to the 'Album Artist' tags of those particular albums.

I re-tagged all the offending albums (using the excellent mp3Tag program) so they all now have an identical 'Album Artist', cleaned the library, updated it, but the offending duplicates were still there.

So, I removed the source, re-added it, let XMBC rebuild the library but I still have the duplicates.

I'm pretty methodical when it comes to my music and I'm confident the tagging is all correct now.

I can't think of anything else I can do. Is there a file somewhere I can manually edit? Is there a file I can delete and let XMBC rebuild it again? Am I confusing XMBC by having the same artists in both the 'Flac Music' and 'MP3 Music' folders?

It's not a big deal but I'm one of those anal types who likes everything neat and tidy. Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.
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#2
Yeah, you might be confusing XMBC by having the same artists in both the 'Flac Music' and 'MP3 Music' folders.

Easy to test. Move one of the folders to a location that is not indexed by xbmc and clean the library.
Then check if the problem is still there.
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#3
Thanks for your reply but actually, I don't think that's the problem - I have many artists with albums in both the 'Flac Music' and 'MP3 Music' folders but it's only in a few instances where I originally found the inconsistent tagging (like 'Beatles' and 'The Beatles)' in the Album Artist field that I have the problem - despite fixing the tags, cleaning the library and even removing and re-adding the source and re-importing the whole shebang 'Beatles' and 'The Beatles' etc etc are still there.

edit:

OK, I moved the 'The Beatles' folder where the original tagging inconsistencies were, as suggested, cleaned and updated the library, and 'Beatles' was gone, leaving just 'The Beatles' (as all the albums are now tagged).

I then copied the directory back, updated the library again and 'Beatles' has reappeared alongside 'The Beatles'. I've checked the tagging again and Artist and Album Artist of all albums is 'The Beatles'.

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#4
Still definitely a tagging issue. When I have a problem like that, I like to add ALL of the albums of that artist and select all the files in Mp3Tag, then clear out all the Artists and Album Artist and save them blank. Then go back and add the Artist back in. Its usually just a couple of stupid tags somewhere.
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#5
Yes, I'm starting to think there must be some invisible tagging discrepancies still in those albums. Thanks, I'll try your suggestion.



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#6
One other thing to remember, the issue might also be arising from a solo artists tag somewhere, eg: do you have any John Lennon albums or anything? There might be offending Album Artist tags in those albums as well.

I learned the hard way when I first started my Music library in XBMC, I was running into the exact same issues you are. I then loaded my complete 18000+ songs into Mp3Tag (yes it can handle that many at once, just takes a while to read the tags) and selected every song and wiped out all data for the "Album Artist", "Disc Number", and "Comments" fields. Seemed to squash quite a few problems, the rest I nailed by fixing the individual albums.
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