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[Mr Swordfish]

Just imported my library from iTunes, and most of the compilation albums came over fine. But about a dozen of them were imported as a series of one-track albums.  How do I aggregate the various tracks into a single album?

In iTunes, combining or splitting albums was straightforward - select all the tracks you want, right click on "song info" and enter the album name. Not sure how it stored it internally or how it handled different albums that happen to have the same title, but I'm sure thate's more to it than just a text match on the album name. 

I don't understand Media Center's data model, but I'm sure that it handles this situation when the data is entered correctly, I haven't seen a way  to aggregate tracks in Music Center.  Probably simple, but I'm not seeing it. I assume you don't expose an interface to the SQL...

[JimH]

Edit the Album Artist.  That tells MC to consider it an album.

[blgentry]

You might enjoy reading this explanation to tell you about the MC approach to this.

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Album_Artist_and_Album_Artist_(Auto)

Brian.

[Mr Swordfish]

Less than 5% of the tracks in my library have the "Album Artist" populated, the rest do not, including all the tracks that are part of compilation albums, some of which are treated as albums and some of which are a bunch of one-track albums.

So, I'm not sure how that would work... and if it does, what do I put there? Something that indicates it's a multiple-artist album? And is there a way to select and eit multiple tracks at a time or do I have to go in and fix up every single track?

I notice that albums that were imported "correctly" say "[Album name] by (Multiple Artists)" while the problematic ones specify the name of the artist in the line above the track list.  So there must be something else that tells Music Center that these tracks should be considered an album.  Not sure how to fix up the data...

[Mr Swordfish]

You might enjoy reading this explanation to tell you about the MC approach to this.

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Album_Artist_and_Album_Artist_(Auto)

Thanks. Useful information.  Unfortunately, it doesn't explain the behavior I'm seeing.

For the "bad" compilations, all the tracks are in the same folder, all the values for "Album" are identical, the "Album Artist" field is empty, but the Album Artist (auto) field is populated by the artist, not the default (Multiple Artists).

Something else must be telling Music Center that these individual tracks are Single-artist albums.  I can't detect and difference in the data between the compilations that were imported correctly and the ones that were not. 

Any idea how Music center determines whether it's a single artist album vs a multiple artist album?

[blgentry]

For the "bad" compilations, all the tracks are in the same folder, all the values for "Album" are identical, the "Album Artist" field is empty, but the Album Artist (auto) field is populated by the artist, not the default (Multiple Artists).

I think you are saying that the [Artist] field, in these albums, has the name of the artist for each individual track.  That's what I would expect with compilation albums.  If they do not have an [Album Artist] field defined, then they will be considered individual albums.

The fix is easy:  Highlight all the tracks in a compilation album.  Open the tagging window (Alt-Enter).  Now type in a value for the [Album Artist] field.  The string "(Multiple Artists)" (without the quotes) is a decent standard to use.  In some cases there will be a different choice.  Like DJ compilation albums will normally have the DJ name as the [Album Artist] and the original artists for the [Artist] field.

The Tag Editor can operate on one or more than one song at a time.   You can edit whole albums, or whole artists (many albums) at once if you like.  I occasionally change an artist name from something like "The Rolling Stones" to "Rolling Stones".  It's all one simple operation with the Tag Editor.

Hopefully this gets you started in the right direction.

Brian.

[Mr Swordfish]

Thanks. This worked. It doesn't explain the previous behavior, but it seems to solve the problem so I'll move on.

I didn't know about the alt+enter method of bringing up the tagging window.  Thanks for that too.

At this point I've seen enough to buy the license and leave iTunes behind.

[blgentry]

Thanks. This worked. It doesn't explain the previous behavior, but it seems to solve the problem so I'll move on.

I didn't know about the alt+enter method of bringing up the tagging window.  Thanks for that too.

At this point I've seen enough to buy the license and leave iTunes behind.

I'm glad to hear you're enjoying MC and solved this particular problem.

If you have any lingering questions about managing compilations, please ask.

When I bought MC I didn't realize it was going to change the way I manage media.  I thought it was a good media player.  It IS a good media player.  But it's a real incredible media manager.  I have become my own digital librarian.  I have more control and understanding of my digital media collection than ever before.  Learning about topics like Compilation management really helped. 

Best of luck with your collection.

Brian.

[Mr Swordfish]

  I occasionally change an artist name from something like "The Rolling Stones" to "Rolling Stones".  It's all one simple operation with the Tag Editor.

Under Tools -> Options -> Tree & View -> Sorting

There's an option to "Ignore articles when sorting" along with an editable field to say what articles you'd like to ignore. The default is:

a;an;the;ein;eine;das;der;die;el;il;la;las;le;les;los;un;une;de l';de la;des;du;l';la;le;les;un;une

It seemed odd to look for the Rolling Stones under T, along with another 87 bands. This fixes that with one click.

Of course, A Tribe Called Quest is now sorted with the T's and De La Soul is under S, so I think I need to edit the article list.  At least Los Lobos is still under L. (c:

Lots of cool features in Music Center once  you find them.

[JimH]

Lots of cool features in Music Center once  you find them.

Thanks.  It's Media Center. 

[blgentry]

Under Tools -> Options -> Tree & View -> Sorting

There's an option to "Ignore articles when sorting" along with an editable field to say what articles you'd like to ignore.

Glad you found that.  I feel like that setting should be on by default.  I turned it on about 6 months into using MC.

My example about Rolling Stones was from a project I was doing for a friend that has a gigantic library.  I was trying to canonicalize his naming.  In some cases he was using both versions (with and without "the" for a particular artist).  We discussed, band by band, which ones did and did not need "the" in front of them.  I still feel like a lot of bands need "the" because that's how I've heard and read about them so many times.  "The Who" is a good example.

Anyway, my main point was that you could change a common attribute across a large group of files.  I've also used this capability to change GENRE for an entire artist.  Back when I was trying to categorize by Genre *and* Style, I did that a lot.  Unfortunately I found that project too difficult and gave up.  I don't use Genre or Style anymore and just ignore those tags. 

Best of luck with MC!

Brian.

[lepa]

I think that [Album Artist (auto)] (Multiple Artists) logic will be broken if there is multiple albums in the same folder. In that case MC thinks that album artist (auto) should be same as artist. To solve this you can either set Album Artist to (Multiple Artist) or use individual folders for every album.