Adding music to the library
Preparing your music collection for scanning into your Music Library may be the most time consuming portion of getting it up and running, but for most users it will probably be well worth it.
Music File TagsYour 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. Tagging Notes: Scanning a source will scan in all subdirectories, including full albums, singles, and unsorted music. If you only need to update a single album folder then no need to rescan the entire album collection. Navigate to the album or artist folder and Update your tagging corrections by scanning! MediaMonkey is the recommended utility for tagging your media! At the time of this writing, tagging your music in Vista Explorer or Tag&Rename will cause your ratings of 1-4 to be read as 0-3. According to the dev. team member jmarshall, "It's actually a 0->255 range in the POPM tag itself." XBMC supports mutli-genre tagging i.e. "Acoustic / Live / Alternative". This is a viable option in response to the lack of sub-genre support. Not only that, but maybe you want to create a smart playlist of all live music. Now you can using this method. The smart playlist is brilliant though ratings alone aren't enough to enjoy a DJ free evening with some friends. You almost need a mood or tempo tag to ensure that the party stays lively. For example, you make have some slow RnB jams like Boyz II Men that you rate a 5 and Some up-beat RnB tracks from Usher that you rate a 4. Well those slow jams will come in and put a damper on the party if you don't monitor the list frequently. You might say, make a rule that leaves out BIIM, but the fact remains that there will be various tempos, ratings, from all artists and genres. One way to combat this would be to use a simple number scale in the comment block. 1 being the tranquil and 5 being a wild, you get the idea. You don't have to do this for every track in your library mind you, just those you rate highly, 3 or better that you would like to distinguish from slower equally rated songs, "RnB, Soul, 2". If you required a little more clarification try Tempo2 or the actual temp or mood settings available in mediamonkey. (Comment contains 2 or "Tranquil"; Comment contains 1 or "Monrose" ; Comment Does not contain 2) Suffice to say, this feature also works for mutli-artist or colaborative works featuring additional artists. Just be sure you put a space in between the artist and the devider just as you did in the genre tag. MS Zune will not insert spaces where needed and in some case may even take out the spaces since it doesn't require them. This will mess up your XBMC library so monitor this carefully!!! |
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, or the TPE2 ID3 tag. 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:
- Identifies albums based on Album name alone in the folder and groups the songs that have the same Album name together as an album.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Tools to Manipulate Music File Tags
There are several tools out there that will allow you to manipulate music ID tags. Most commonly available media players allow users to manipulate ID tags (Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp etc.)
An example of a free ID tag manipulation program is MediaMonkey.
If you want to download album art thumbnails for multiple albums at a time, try Album Art Aggregator.
A tutorial has been started 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. It is an efficient way to tag albums and fetch album art thumbnails.
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Embedded Album Art
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XBMC supports embedded album art in music files. File formats that do not support embedded Album Art images: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 |