[StrongEagle]

I have a couple of situations that I am trying to deal with.

I have at least a few dozen custom compilation music albums, that is to say, it's not a commercially produced compilation but rather one that was put together by me or others. For example, I have seven "Dance Party" CD's that were cut by a DJ friend of mine years ago. I do want to be able to keep the compilation together (one way or another) since they are actually flow pretty well. But when they were recorded, they were of course, "Track 1", "Track 2", etc as opposed to having an actual song title.

I used Picard and its ability to listen to a song to identify it (before I ever found XBMC) with somewhat mixed results, especially if the song appeared in more than one album... and really messy if the song appeared in an album and later in another compilation. A lot of my songs were incorrectly renamed, and it took quite some time to go back through the results to correct song, artist, and album using MusicBee. It's mostly correct but I still have some errors where song and artist don't match.

So... question one is: What is the best way to approach these compilations? Should I allow the music scraper to assign every song to its correct album and then use a playlist or some such to be able to recreate the CD? And... what is the best folder structure for these songs? Right now, they were ripped to disk under a generic folder like Dance Party Disc 1. Should I leave them this way or lump them into an "unknown album" folder?

Most of my library was developed from ripping most of my CD's before I went overseas. Most of the song titles are OK but I've found two annoying things, the first being that the song title is preceded by a track number... 01 02, etc, and for some albums, like Pink Floyd, really ugly song titles with track numbers and underscores. These don't seem to match up well at all with any database services. When I used Picard to ID the song it was a real pain as more than a few that actually belong to an album were assigned elsewhere, breaking up the album. I think I have most of these fixed but what will XBMC do?

I have also downloaded various songs from various places... some borrowed from mp3's, some ripped by iTunes, some bought in iTunes, some ripped by WMP, downloaded from other music services, and still others downloaded and converted from YouTube... nothing from the pirate .ru sites I might add. But now, I have songs that are in various folders that actually belong to the same album and artist. How to best deal with this situation?

Many thanks.

[whitebelly]

If you have a compilation album that you have created, just give it a custom album name and assign that album name to every song. You should change Album Artist tag on each song to 'various artists' of some other of your choosing. You'll probably want to renumber the tracks as well. Select or create a cover art image and add that to each song as well.

If you want to save the original album name, put it in the filename and/or the comment field, or create a custom tag.

MBID tags can cause problems if XBMC is set to read them, either turn off in XBMC or delete those tags.

Otherwise, for single songs, tagging each properly is your only solution. Use creative album names like "singles-artist", to group them.

[StrongEagle]

Thank you for the response. I can see that I have some work to do to get my library properly organized.

I am encountering an additional issue that I do not know how to deal with. The attached files show the contents of a two disc set, "Music Mechanique".

When I added this album, containing various artists, (and as part of a massive library load), it was split into multiple albums, all with the same album artwork. In this case I got

Aguirre - with a single song, Aguirre II
Music Mechanique Disc 1 - with two songs
Music Mechanique Dics 2 - with three songs

The rest of the songs simply cannot be found in the library.

It turned another album, "Beautiful Asia" into at least 8 albums, all named as the single song within them. This album is a commercial album, purchased in Asia and very difficult to find online. What's odd about this one is that all the songs are from one artist, "The Imperial Symphony Orchestra".

I used the universal album scraper and left all the settings at default values.

Can someone explain why this has happened? What do I need to do to my library to clean this mess up? Fortunately, I have a backup copy.

Thanks.

[Brian B]

Load all the songs into a tag editor and make sure the album = "Music Mechanique." Don't include disc 1 or 2 in the album name. Then, if the artists are different change Album Artist = "Various Artists" The artist for the songs can be different. For the disc tag area you can set 1 of 2 and 2 of 2 to group the discs into 1 album.

For the second case just set album artist = song artist = "The Imperial Symphony Orchestra" Then, make sure the album title is exactly the same on all the songs.

B.