In the comments to Charlie Owen’s post on the Media Center code in Windows Vista, a commenter asks:
Here’s a simple question that hits at the heart of things, I think: have you ever, EVER gone to someone’s house and seen them sort their CDs by album title? When you go to a record store and look in the jazz section, is it EVER organized by album? No on both counts: people organize around artists, even if by artists within a genre. So why in the world is MCE focusing so much on albums, other than the pretty graphics?!? Why, when going to My Music, do we see 27 tiny pictures rather than a list that will help us quickly find what we want to hear?
In the current version of Media Center, you can sort by artist or by album. You can also right-click to display the album view as a list rather than a bunch of album covers.
I think the overall point is a good one, though. I have about 1200 albums in my Media Center collection and navigation is a major pain.
27 comments ↓
Does anyone know how to remove duplicate album entries within MyMusic?
What i’d really like to do is find the database that MCE2005 uses and edit that so MyMusic is more organized and not full of 1 song albums or albums with 25 different artist names for one song. Gimme a break.
Any suggestions?
One thing I have found helpful in cleaning up my album collection on my Media Center PC is launching Windows Media Player and cleaning up the collection there. This uses the same data as MCE. You clean up your collection in Windows Media Player and your changes are reflected in MCE. Also from within Windows Media Player you have the ability to search for the correct album data to clean your collection and grab the correct art work.
Thanks Brad, I’ll give that a shot tonight.
Cheers to you,
frank grimes
Does anyone know how to get the album art to show up on the main album screen in MCE? I know I have the album art linked, it shows in other players and in song view in MCE. Please email me if you can help.
There is a hidden file in the folder that has your album songs. The hidden file is called folder.jpg, this is the cover art that MCE uses. If there is no folder.jpg then MCE will not display the album art. You can scan the album in or down load the art and rename it to folder.jpg, change the attribute to hidden and put it in the folder with the songs. I believe the correct size for the JPG should be 200×200.
Does anyone know how to merge two album listings in MediaCenter. I copies disk one and disk two of the same album and it created two entries in the album list.
David, you should manage your library from Windows Media Player, which shares the same library as Media Center. First, you need to change the track numbers on disk 2 so that they begin one number higher than the last cut on disk 1. Then you need to change the album title in both locations so that the title is the same instead of being CD1 or CD2. That should merge the entries in the Music Library.
Anyone know how to merge albums in WMP 11 Beta. In WMP 10 you could just drag one album to another and it would merge. dont seen able to do this in WMP 11. any suggestions?
Thanks
mark,
i have matched tags manually in “advanced tag editor” and sometimes, only sometimes, do the albums merge into one. i would love a merge function, too.
does anybody know how WMP11beta decides to files into an “album”?
update. hmm seems like his msg board doesn’t get a lot of traffic. well anyway, it seems (though i won’t say for sure and still looking for an answer) that when certain data is identical, mp11beta places the files under one ‘album’. problem is, i haven’t been able to effectively update certain data. for example, i’ve noticed some of the tracks in an ‘album’ have ‘album artist’ filled in with ‘artist’. some don’t. but i can’t delete the information in the ‘album artst’ field.
Frank, this isn’t really a message board. This is a place for people to comment on blog posts I’ve made. The fact that a conversation sometimes happens is just a lucky accident.
To answer your question, you should use the Advanced Tag Editor or a third-party editor like Abyss Audio eMusic Tag Editor to merge albums.
in my experience the albums appear split up because of duplicate songs. if the duplicates are deleted then the next time you search for the ablum it merges and appears as one. this probs only works in some cases tho - but hope it helps
hi ed, thanks for the info. i use musicbrainz myself. i’m more curious as to how mp11beta’s database works. how is a track assigned to a unique id in the library database? the main theory out there is that certain metadata must be the same. any definitive answers would be appreciated. thanks, and thanks for providing a space for lucky accidents, ed!
In xp, media center, my music, album art does display for all tracks correctly when I play a music file but I cannot get any art to show in album list. Is there something I am not entering correctly in settings?
Just thought I’d drop in and share with what I just learned about wmp 11 beta. I was surfing looking for info on my library splitting my albums up and stumbled upon ed’s blog. I’ve found that if you want to combine albums you need to edit the “advanced tag editor” and make sure that all the info matches across all the songs. Apperently wmp 11 uses each of the fields on the tag to classify songs. If even one field is different (except for track title, #, and run time) it’ll create a second album. I even had to make the genre the same. After a complete pain in my butt I finally got the albums to merge. Hope this helps
Thanks Ed for your help
Another Way that works on merging albums, although time consuming, is to right click and update album info. It doesnt always work, but more often than not it will put the albums together
Hi Ed (and others who are posting here),
I have tried to manually add the album art by:
* Finding the art from amazon.com
* Renaming it to folder.jpg
* Chazing the size to 200*200, and
* Making it “hidden”.
Now I can see the album art when the songs play, but the album view in My Music do not show it. Is that normal? And if not, do you (or anyone else) know how to fix this problem?
Thanks a bunch!
Riza
Try http://www.avsoft.nl/artfixer/ it will search Amazon etc. and update your art, works well and is unrestricted with only requests a voluntary payment
Oh and I find that multiple albums is caused by inconsistencies in the Album tag. Multi-disc albums can also be combined by re-numbering the albums and changing the Album tag so it is the same for all tracks (the MP3s do not have to inhabit the same folder). If you want to manipulate MP3 tags I would recommend MP3Tag from http://www.mp3tag.de, again this is free but welcomes donations.
I have the same problem as Riza.(17).
This problem with album art is not only contained to the mce music folders. When in the video folders (in mce), the album art does not appear for me. Even after manually adding a folder.jpg file, it still does not appear. I am at a complete loss. One thing I have noticed, is that there is no desktop.ini hidden file in the video folder. I dont know if this is the problem.
ANY and ALL ideas to remedy this problem are appreciated!!
HI,
I have a song title that has suddenly appeared in the list of Playlists displayed when I open Windows Media Player 11 and it is not among the .wpl files in the Playlist folder. It is a phantom file as I can’t do anything with it and I would just like to delete it. Right-clicking the file brings up the submenu , but none of the options respond to a click.
Adding to my above mail: The name of the song is “Cry me a River”. I did a search on my HDD and examined the eight icons found with this name. I found one that was a Playlist Icon so I deleted it. I did a Registry search for “Cry me a River” and deleted the three keys found. Could the solution be in the CurrentDatabase_360 and is there an editor to examine this file?
Ted, you can delete that database and then restart Media Player to rebuild it from scratch. There’s no editor for that file format, unfortunately.
Hi, Ed,
Many thanks for your reply.
After writing my last post I replaced my Current Database_360 with one from an old backup and rebooted. All my files were out of order, of course, but
the unwanted Playlist was still there! As this problem only showed up recently, I’m not blaming my database now. I have also tried another wmploc.dll without success.
All is not lost, however, as I can hide this listing by unchecking “Show All” in the Playlist Menu.
Hi, Ed,
I finally decided to delete the CurrentDatabase_360 and this cured my problem. WMP11 rebuilt the library beautifully. Many thanks.
When opening WMP11 and clicking “Library > Pictures” can the opened page be set to “Titles” as default?
i have read every feed on this page. Getting mce to display album art for music is a piece of cake…..The 1 thing that seems to be beating me at the mo is to get it to display the album art for movies…….Does anyone know how to achieve this. I have it set the exact same way as my music which works a treat………I am strating to think that it is not possible to display album art for movies…………???????????????????????
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