[cayotic]

I wanted to add some information to the the music library section reguarding meta tags but even though I was logged in, it said it was locked for editing. How does an experienced long time user get editorial rights to the manual?




I've talked about the compatibility issues between windows music tags and XBMC before. As of late, I'm tempted to lean in the direction of XBMC on these issues since zune2 no longer uses a 5 star rating system. :mad:


First of all; vista and Zune use dual artist categories. This was created as a means to displaying featured or contributing artists without cluttering the track title. It makes sense but it means headaches for developers.

I was hopeing to mention this in the "Preparing your Music to be Scanned" section of the manual so that users would tag their music appropriately for XBMC. I use XBMC to play my music the most and the manual is directed to users of similar interest.

Users should ensure that the vista 'Artists tags' contain just the album artist and not include the featured artists (Dr. Dre;Snoop Dogg). The reason is, if you navigate to the artist section within library mode of XBMC, you will see every possible combination of "artist" displayed when you really desired to know a single artist only. (Akon, Akon/Baby bash, Akon/Eminem, Akon/T-Pain) Ths list goes on in fact if you scroll down you will see Baby Bash/Akon since they both used the same song on their albums.

A bonus feature which the Zune has would be to indicate which songs an artist appeared on outside of their catalogue of music. (Soundtracks and contributing work 'feature'.) I noticed that XBMC is smart enough to recognize that a song belongs in multiple genres (Alternative / Rock or Rock / Metal). Like with IMDB movies, you can navigate to a category or genre and see a movie listed in Horror that is also listed in Thriller. Library music does this with genres but it doesn't do this with featured artists though the vista "artists tag" is available should XBMC choose to use it appropriately just as it does with the genre tag.


At this point I'm planning to make both tags reflect the same information which is time consuming in a 37gb music collection. How to I make XBMC choose my 'album artist' tags (which only indicate 1 artist) instead of the 'artists' tag that it currently gathers information incorrectly from? Or you could consider inplementing the use of both tags as they were designed.


And secondly, XBMC still reports a 1 star rating less than the rating displayed in Vista explorer and Zune (pre-2.0) Which, isn't all that big a deal, I just use the smart playlists to find songs greater than 2 stars which translates to
songs greater than 3 when tagged in windows vista. I was just going to mention this in the manual so that others would be aware and not be too alarmed about it.


I've been using the movie database for years and the TV database is slowly coming along to where is grabs "acurate" episode information and thumbs. I've never been a fan of the music database; however, features like smart playlists and party mode encourage me to tag my music accordingly. There are just some aspects that need to be fine tuned.

For party mode, I would like to see the use of a tempo or "mood tag" that vista has so that slow dance songs aren't tossed into the party playlist. It's a mood killer... "Mood is greater than '2' or 'relaxed'." Of course I wouldn't waste time mood tagging any track that wasn't worth rating in the first place.


Thanks guys... I don't know what I would do without XBMC at both ends of my house!

[pike]

Really

http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.ph...=Main_Page

Editing and creating articles has been locked down indefinitely. All users who wish to continue providing a valid contribution to the XBox Media Center online manual, please contact one of the XBMC team members and ask for Ninja status on the wiki. Easiest way to get in touch is via #XBMC on freenode irc network. Thanks for understanding

hard to miss that little piece of info I guess. so what's your registered username on wiki ?

[jmarshall]

Hi there,

XBMC quite happily shows and allocates more than one artist to an song, and will list that song under all of the artist categories.

XBMC uses " / " as the separator for multiple artists in those tagging formats that don't have multiple artist tags available (eg id3), but this is (ofcourse) configurable via advancedsettings.xml, under <musiclibrary><itemseparator>. This applies to multiple genres or multiple artists.

As for "moods", XBMC doesn't read any mood tags at all.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[cayotic]

Really

http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.ph...=Main_Page


hard to miss that little piece of info I guess. so what's your registered username on wiki ?

UserID: Cayotic

I never saw the home page before, I usually use google to find the page I want (XBMC music libary) or go to Online Manual page I have bookmarked which I'm sure I also found through google.
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/inde...ine_Manual

Reguardless, it's my fault... if you can hook me up so I can contribute, that would be great.

XBMC uses " / " as the separator for multiple artists in those tagging formats that don't have multiple artist tags available (eg id3), but this is (ofcourse) configurable via advancedsettings.xml, under <musiclibrary><itemseparator>. This applies to multiple genres or multiple artists.

I added the code to my existing advance settings.xml. Is this correct? Or should I put the semicolan in between the item separator tags like this: <itemseparator>;</itemseparator>
And if so, is it important to 'remove' the '/' like you would remove folder.jpg like in the example below.

With the current '/' it doesn't display all available songs under the "ArtistX" directory within Library mode/Artists. I would think that substituting the ';' for the '/' might solve the problem. If it doesn't, then I will have to consider forcing XBMC to use the Album Artist tag.

I noticed that in vista to add a second genre I have to use '/' even though it suggests a ';' otherwise it wont accept it. Under the Artists tag, it will allow either ';' or '/' but vista changes it to a ';' after accepting the property changes.

Code:

<advancedsettings>
    <setting>value</setting>

<musicthumbs>
  <add>thumb.jpg|cover.jpg</add>
  <remove>folder.jpg</remove>
</musicthumbs>

<musiclibrary>
  <itemseparator>
    <add>;</add>
    <remove>/</remove>
  </itemseparator>
</musiclibrary>

    <setting>value</setting>
</advancedsettings>

[pike]

welcome Ninja! Please only add good info to our precious manual!

[jmarshall]

<itemseparator>;</itemseparator>

No add or remove there - there's one and only one accepted by XBMC. Note that XBMC's default is ' / ' (space slash space) for the usual reasons (AC/DC etc.)

[cayotic]

I'm honored

Hopefully, I can contribute something to a project that has had such a large inpact on the digital age.

I mean, Xbox 360 was built and constantly updated around the features we suggest and implement in XBMC!

[cayotic]

Ok, I think I know what it is... after experimenting with multi-genre use I found that it wouldn't put my music into two separate genres if the tag was populated such as "Acoustic/Live/Alternative".

Zune doesn't not use space around the slashes and is able to recognize the additional information as separate. I believe this is the reason I've been having trouble with my artists getting jumbled up in library mode.



Is there any way to get XBMC to not require the _/_ spaces that surround the divider?

Thanks, I added my finding to the manual... multi genre tagging should allow for a more flexible and accurate smart playlist.

[jmarshall]

Use <itemseparator>/</itemseparator> then.

[cayotic]

Use <itemseparator>/</itemseparator> then.

Sorry, I tried


<itemseparator> / </itemseparator>

<itemseparator>/</itemseparator>



And neither of them have an effect on my genre or artists.

But since my genres are separated by _/_ and my artists are separated by / (without spaces) I may have to do some honest hard labor. Which, for perfection, I'm looking forward to it.

The artist tags that I have already changed to include spaces have already been recongnized by XBMC.

Thanks for helping me brainstorm on this on...

[Gamester17]

@cayotic, while you are one the topic you might want to look over these articles bellow
http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.ph...your_Music
http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.ph...udio_Files
http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.ph...music_tags
http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.ph...ic_Library
http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Music