FNG About to pull his hair out... lol

It's got nothing to do with your file naming convention. The filesystem layout is irrelevant. The fault is in your tags. If you see an artist of "ACDC", its because Xbmc found that artist in one of your file's tags. Do this: Artists -> ACDC -> *All Albums, to get the full list of songs with that artist tag. Inspect one of those files. Feel free to PM me for further help, especially if you don't mind sending me one of the offending files.

CACHE, SCAN & CLEAN...*

If you scanned an item into your library, received the incorrect result 'ACDC', then made changes to correct them, then scanned again, that is likely the source of your problem.

Everything in XBMC is based upon data that is cached to the main program folder. The items that you changed in order to correct them are seen as 'NEW' content by XBMC in the subsequent scan. So even if every music file currently shows as 'AC/DC' when you check your ID3 tags, all of them that at some point showed 'ACDC' instead will appear in your Music Library twice: once as 'ACDC' and again as 'AC/DC'.

Check to see if the XBMC Music Settings page in your current skin will allow you 'clean' your Music Library. That is, remove items listed in the Library's cache that no longer point to valid media. If not, then you will have to manually choose each entry of 'ACDC', bring up the Context menu (press 'C' on the keyboard when the item is highlighted) and choose 'Remove from Library'. I hope this helps!

Unta Glebin Gloutin Globin,

Red Ronin, The Cybernetic Samurai



* I only suggest this because I had a similar issue when tackling my own Video/Movies/Television Library issues.

Lies. That only applies to videos.

With music, if you change a tag, then the old information is removed, and the new information replaces it.

Cheers,
Jonathan

The issue was an incorrect ENSEMBLE tag.

jmarshall Wrote:Lies. That only applies to videos.

With music, if you change a tag, then the old information is removed, and the new information replaces it.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Jonathan,
Recently I added a group and several albums to my music library, then had to update my tags with the MediaMonkey application. Once I rescanned the library I got two entries of the same albums with the artist name spelled differently (e.g. Beatles and BEATLES) - based on tags BEFORE and AFTER the above tag update.
I cannot remove the wrong entries, i.e. the entries based on info before the update. Somebody mentioned "remove from library" function, like in movies. I do have this function in movies but do not have it in music. I scanned the music library after the update several times. Also used "clean database" function. What else should I try? Is there any guide on how to troubleshoot issues with music library? Any advice would be very much appreciated.
Thanks, Alex
Acer 3610; PM3HD skin

@Albranov
Do you still have songs linked under the incorrectly spelled artist name? If not, Clean Library should detect and remove those orphaned artists.

kraqh3d Wrote:@Albranov
Do you still have songs linked under the incorrectly spelled artist name? If not, Clean Library should detect and remove those orphaned artists.

Hi kraqh3d,
Thank you for a quick reply. When I tried YAMJ and UMC some time ago I did not get replies the same quickly.
I do have several albums linked under the incorrectly spelled artist name. I guess the library picked up several albums under ARTIST name, then I updated tags for Artist, rescanned it and now have one "album1" linked to ARTIST, and "album1", "album2" and "album3" linked to Artist. In other words the same "album1" is linked to both ARTIST and Artist. I could not figure out how to get rid of the incorrectly spelled artist name with the linked albums. Please advise.
Thanks, Alex

Open a trac ticket with the details. I understand why Clean Library isn't working. It's recursive. It first cleans up the songs. Then it looks for orphaned albums with no songs linked. It then looks for orphaned artists that have no songs OR albums linked. Your incorrect "ARTIST" is linked to a valid album entry so its not removed.

You're going to have to force all the songs to be removed and rescan. You can delete the source, and Xbmc will ask if you want to remove the LIbrary items. Say yes. Then add the source back and scan. Or if you can target the exact folders where the incorrectly tagged file where located and change the folder name, it'll correct itself on an update.

I'm not sure how an Album can stay linked to an incorrect artist - the album artists are after all derived from the song tags. Assuming the song tags were updated, then the album would have been removed, and thus the artist would also be removed.

What am I missing?

jmarshall Wrote:I'm not sure how an Album can stay linked to an incorrect artist - the album artists are after all derived from the song tags. Assuming the song tags were updated, then the album would have been removed, and thus the artist would also be removed.

What am I missing?

Hi kraqh3d & Jonathan,
I checked tags for all albums and bands in question in MediaMonkey and got an answer/solution. The incorrect artist was triggered by an incorrect entry in AlbumArtist field. In the Artist field I had "Artist", in AlbumArtist I had "ARTIST". Somehow XBMC returned both bands - "Artist" and "ARTIST". The funny thing is XBMC showed the same album for both "Artist" and "ARTIST". MediaMonkey has this album only once. The bottom line the moment I changed "ARTIST" to "Artist" for one particular album, and updated library in XBMC, everything was back to normal. The lesson learned - the "AlbumArtist" field must be accurate (I never paid attention to this field before XBMC).
Thank you guys.
Another query. Is there any plans to have fields in Music Library to reflect band's line-up, similar to "Cast" in movies? It would allow user to navigate between bands where the artist in question participated.
One more question. Is there any way to distinguish studio albums from compilations and live albums?
I really like XBMC and I have YAMJ, UMC and some other jukeboxes to compare with. Finally I can spend time on optimizing my music library instead of endless hours/days fixing shares, mounts and other things that "would be fixed in the next build".
Thanks again, Alex