Adding music to the library

XBMC adds music to the library by scanning music files to extract identifying information from tags in the files. In order to be able to include information on your music collection in the music library, XBMC needs your music to be tagged. When your collection is scanned, XBMC stores all the tagging information (artist, album, year, genre, etc) in the database which allows you to efficiently search and manage your music collection.

Your audio files MUST have a valid ID tag for them to work properly in the XBMC music library. There are third party applications available for download from the internet that allow you to add and manage ID tags in your music files.

Scanning Your Music Into the Music Library
To scan your music collection into the Music Library, first make sure you are not in 'Library Mode' (checkmark on the left). Next, browse to the location of your music collection and bring up the the Context Menu. (The selected item can be a music file, a folder containing music files, or a folder containing other folders.) Select the option labelled "Scan Item to Library". XBMC will then scan the selected music source into the library database. Once the scan is complete, you can browse your collection by selecting 'Library Mode'.

You can simplify the library maintenance by selecting the option "Update library on startup" (Menu System > Settings > Music > Library). This way, each time you start your XBMC, the sources will be scanned and library updated with the new contents. You can still, off course, scan manually the sources as explained just before.

Sources for Music
XBMC gives you the ability to listen to music from a variety of sources, click here for more information and examples of Types of Media Sources (link).

Some examples of sources that allow you to easily access all your digital music collection: For information on how to configure remote file shares, please click here (link)
 * On your computer or a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device/system, which supports SMB file sharing
 * Stored directly on the hard drive
 * On CDs/DVDs
 * Streamed from the Internet

Applications to edit music Tags
Your audio files MUST have correct audio tags to use the Music Library mode. Without tags you're limited to the fileview in XBMC. There are several tools out there that will allow you to manipulate music ID tags.


 * Supplemental tools/Linux
 * Supplemental tools/Mac OS X
 * Supplemental tools/Windows

Technical Explanation: File tags
''Skip this section if you're not interested a technical explanation of this subject. You don't need this information to use what is explained in the previous section.''

For many categories, such as genres and artists, XBMC supports multiple values in the one field. By default it uses the character sequence " / " to divide the entry into multiple values. This divider may be changed via advancedsettings.xml.

Artist Tags - Resolving Compilations and Multiple Artists
XBMC reads the Album Artist tag in ID3, Ogg, APE and MP4 tags and uses it if available to assign an artist to the album (independently of the track's artist information). This is the "Album Artist" tag (in ID3 this is represented by the "TPE2" tag; in vorbiscomment (ogg) files "ALBUMARTIST", "ALBUM ARTIST" and "ENSEMBLE" are all supported). Multiple artists for either a track or album artist can be specified in "Artist1 / Artist2 / Artist3" format.

If no Album Artist tag exists, XBMC will use the first (primary) artist from the tracks as the Album Artist. Essentially we do a string comparison of all the track artists, and assign the common artists as the Album artist. This is generally the TPE1 tag in ID3.

As many users don't yet use the Album Artist tag, XBMC has an additional filter system for identifying compilation albums, where each track normally has a different artist. As XBMC scans a folder, it does the following:


 * 1) Identifies albums based on Album name alone in the folder and groups the songs that have the same Album name together as an album.
 * 2) Runs through each album's assigned songs.  If there is 2 or more tracks with the same Track number, the group of songs must come from 2 or more albums, so the Album name is ruled out as a possible compilation.
 * 3) If any of the songs assigned to the Album name have an Album Artist tag, then XBMC assumes the user knows what they're doing, and this album is also ruled out from being a compilation.
 * 4) If two or more songs assigned to the Album name then have different primary artists, then the Album name is considered to be a group of songs from a compilation, and the Various Artists" tag is assigned as the album artist.
 * 5) Otherwise, if all the songs have the same primary artist but don't have the same full artist list (eg a song or two has an additional artist) then the album is assigned the primary artist as it's Album Artist, and we assume the additional artists are guest artists.

Ratings in ID3 tags
Ratings in ID3 tags are read via the POPM field, and (if this doesn't exist) in a custom (TXXX) field named "RATING". For the RATING field, we accept 1-5 as valid ratings. For the POPM field things are more complicated, as there is no established standard in place. We currently most closely respect what Mediamonkey does, and also have some support for what Windows Media Player 11 does. The POPM tag takes a value from 0..255, with 0 meaning no rating, 1 the worst, and 255 the best. We currently map these as follows:

Embedded Album Art
XBMC supports embedded album art in files with ID3 tags, WMA tags and MP4 tags only. It does not support embedded album art in APE, Ogg or FLAC tags currently. To have album art for these formats, see the Thumbnails portion of the manual.

Album art and thumbnails
The same goes for playlists, Cue sheets, SHOUTcast, and internet-stream files, eg: Music\path\audioplaylistname.m3u Music\path\audioplaylistname.tbn Music\path\cuelistname.cue Music\path\cuelistname.tbn Music\path\shoutcastlinkname.pls Music\path\shoutcastlinkname.tbn Music\path\audiostreamname.strm Music\path\audiostreamname.tbn

If you store each of your music-albums or artists in a separate subfolder to keep things organized, you can also make the folder have a custom thumbnail image. To do this you need to rename your .jpg thumbnail as folder.jpg and place it in the folder (the size of the picture can be anything from 64x64 to 256x256 in pixel size).

Example:

Music\path\album\folder.jpg

Now your album/artist folder will have a lovely custom thumbnail-image.

You can via advancedsettings.xml change the default filename of the image that XBMC uses for music folders. See the  tag. for more information.