[navanman]

Thought I'd start a thread and see could I get some opinions on the best way to tag the misc mp3 that I have in my music collection.

I have all my regular albums ripped and tagged correctly and they show really nice in XBMC music library.
But I have a bunch of songs from different albums, singles, just 1 song and tagging them normally leads to a rather long album/artist list in the library.

I use Mp3tag as my id3 tagging program and I find it easy to good for me and easy to use. I put all my misc mp3s in one folder and changed the "Album" tag on all of them to "Misc Music" thinking it would be a stroke or genius but what I ended up with was still a long list of artist albums just called "Misc Music"

So whats the best way to tag them to have neat music library in XBMC.
Would you change the Artist tag to "Various Artists" and then amend the "Title" tag to show artist and song name?

Any opinions appreciated...

[jmarshall]

I'd set the AlbumArtist tag to "Misc Artists", and leave the artist tag alone.

[ShortySco]

Yeah, what JM said is pretty much how i do it, works fine.

A couple more ideas.....

Code:

<musiclibrary>
    <hidecompilationartists>true</hidecompilationartists>
  </musiclibrary>

This is an advancedsettings.xml entry, it filters the music/artist node to remove all artists that only appear on compilation albums, but you can still find all the artists when searching by genre.

And if you also change the genres of these songs to "Misc Artists", it'd keep the genre node nice and clean too

Shorty

[navanman]

Thanks for the replys guys. I'll try it out the weekend and see how it works out.

[navanman]

Can anybody confirm this for me:
I have a few "Best of" albums and noticed that a few were tagged "Best of" and "Best Of". I decided to change them all to "Best of" and did update library through context menu.
The library scan didn't pick up the changes in the tagging. I changed a letter in the tags and "update library" picked up the changes.
So from what I am seeing, if you change the capitalisation of a letter in a tag the update library doesn't pick this up.
I had to nuke my database and can again from scratch to pick up the changes.

[jmarshall]

Yeah - it only picks up changes in file size, date, and name.

If your change didn't update any of these, then that'll be the reason.

[vambo]

Hi all

Just updated XBMC from a very old Sept06 release to XBMC-SVN_2007-10-21_rev10582-T3CH, but boy do i wish i hadn't

everything works fine except compilation albums are driving me nuts. I have quiet a few and there tagged thus

artist > correct artist for the individual track
albumartist > set to "Various Artists"
genre > set to "Compilation"
Compilation flag is set. Everything done with Tag&Rename 3.3.5

I have this in guisettings.xml

<musiclibrary>
<hideallitems>true</hideallitems>
<allitemsonbottom>true</allitemsonbottom>
<hidecompilationartists>true</hidecompilationartists>
<albumssortbyartistthenyear>true</albumssortbyartistthenyear>
<itemseparator> / </itemseparator>
</musiclibrary>

What i get after deleting the old music database and rescanning is this.
All the compilation albums appear in the compilations section of the music library as expected. However all the artists appear in the artist section which isn't what i expected. This leaves me with 254 pages of artists when i should have less than 15 or so. Most of these as you can guess show 1 or 2 albums with 1 track on them.

Also slightly off topic the "All Albums" button is showing for anyone with more than 1 album and its at the top (I don't really want to see it at all cos i have no use for it what so ever).

Can any one help? Jim? Anyone? before i have to go back to my old 06 version and loose all the lovely new skins, views and stuff.

BTW
before i had the "artist" and "albumartist" tags the other way round to keep itunes and my old ipod happy. It just meant all the compilations where grouped under a "Various Artists" artist. The new version of XBMC did exactly the same with these files, and as I'd updated my tags on the PC after getting a new ipod classic and new version of itunes, i deleted the old files off the xbox and re transferred them over with the new tags but no joy I have deleted the music db every time I've rescanned too, just in case.

[vambo]

Doh!!

whose a numpty then :-(

just realised its advancedsettings.xml not guisettings.xml anymore.

Everything works fine now sorry, must learn to read :-)

[yabel]

I think this a question along the same line. I have my loose mp3 in a folder and xbmc has set any loose mp3 with a Toby Keith Thumb Nail. I have tried changin it over and over but I seem to be doing something wrong cause it goes back to this thumb nail. Any ideas?

[chikko]

did you try adding a folder.jpg to that directory, and then rescan the database?