Adding music to the library
Fixing your tags
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Preparing your database for scanning is the most time consuming portion of getting it up and running. A tutorial has been written on a piece of software called tag&rename. Tag&rename will write id3 v1 and v2, wma, ogg, ape, and flac tags with information fetched from amazon.com, and cddb. Ive found it the most efficent way to tag albums and fetch album art thumbnails. If others have other options please notify loto on irc.freenode.net #xbmc |
Tags that dont support embedded cover art images
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Ape, Ogg, and Flac tags do not support embedded images. To have files of these formats display an image you must either flag the directory a single image by naming an image folder.jpg and placing it inside the directory or if, for example you have song.ogg you must name the image (jpg or png format) song.tbn. For more information on thumbnails see the Thumbnails portion of the manual |
Scanning your music
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To start scanning your music change the my music view to 'files'. Then proceed to browse to the location of your music collection and press the white button. This shows the context menu with various options. Select the entry labeled "Scan folder to database". XBMC will then proceed to scan the music in the background. Once this is complete you can browse your collection by changing the view to 'Library' XBMC can and does read the "Album Artist" tag in ID3, vorbis, APE and MP4 tags and uses this if available to assign an artist to the album (independently of the track's artist). Multiple artists can be specified in "Artist1 / Artist2 / Artist3" format, and if no album artist tag exists, XBMC will use the first (primary) artist as the album artist, unless all tracks from the album contain the same multiple artists. As many users don't yet use Album Artist tags, 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. Identify all albums based on albumname alone in the folder, and group the songs that have each albumname together. 2. Run through each album's assigned songs. If there is 2 or more tracks with the same tracknumber, the group of songs must come from 2 or more albums, so the albumname is ruled out as a possible compilation. 3. If any of the songs assigned to the albumname 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 albumname then have different primary artists, then the albumname 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. Note that scanning in this example would scan all directories listed including full albums, singles, and unsorted |
