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[Doof]

Basically, the idea is that when MC determines that an album is "incomplete" that it could somehow tell you WHY it considers it to be incomplete. Maybe add a little "Explain" button in the text field next to the Complete Album value field. And it would pop up a dialog box that would spell it out for you.

It can get rather tiring at times to try and figure out why. Especially when an album has complete status, and then one thing you do OUTSIDE of MC suddenly renders it incomplete. And what you did wasn't even to one of the tracks of the album.

[Matt]

Do you think there are flaws in the logic?

Keeping all the album files in the same directory seems to stump people, but it's sort of a necessary assumption for the logic to work.

Maybe it could say "Incomplete -- Missing Track #" or "Incomplete -- Files Not In Same Directory" or something...

[Doof]

Something like that would be really nice.

I know that the full album APE file threw me once before, but that's not the problem here.

I've got 11 APL files, all in the same directory, all with the same Artist, Album, Genre, Date, Bios, Image File, etc. The only <varies> that I see are for things that should vary, like Name, Track #, BPM, etc.

The track numbers are all correct, 1-11.

I just can't figure it out. There are some other files in the same folder (the album APE, folder.jpg and Godsmack - Awake.jpg), but none of these are imported into MC.

The only thing I can possibly think of is that one of the tracks is only 49 seconds long, but that's as it should be. But... I know that's not causing it because I have other albums with even shorter tracks, and they are all ok.

What are the exact criteria that it uses? That would be a big help to me right now. I know it's been posted before but could you post it one more time? Adding this list to the help system would be nice, too.

But if you could find some way of providing some real-time feedback about what's wrong, that would be even better.

[Doof]

Well, I deleted the whole album from the library, reimported, and bam. It's back to Complete Album again. Not sure why MC thought it was incomplete, but it would have been nice to know why it thought so...

[Doof]

Hmmm... I might be on to something here. I just got it to do it again.

Both times, I edited the tags of the two album art files from within MC, but neither are imported (don't ask).

Both times, MC immediately believed the albums to be incomplete, even though everything for the files actually imported into the library stayed the same. The only changes were made to files that weren't imported.

And both times, deleting the files from the library and reimporting them fixed the complete album status.

Bug?

[Doof]

Correction. The simple act of using Locate->On Disk (inside Media Center) causes this to happen. I didn't even do anything to the files once I got there, and suddenly a complete album is rendered incomplete.

I haven't tested if manually navigating to the album from MC's Explorer tree causes this, though. I imagine it probably does.

[Matt]

Good find Doof.

MC's database is broken into pieces:

Main
CD's
Explorer (flushed on exit)
etc.

When it analyzes the album info, it was looking at the Explorer files too, so that APL file was goofing it.  Next build should take care of it.

Thanks!

[Doof]

You're welcome.

But that "Incomplete -- Missing Track #" or "Incomplete -- Files Not In Same Directory" would still be nice.

[Kurt Young]

Basically, the idea is that when MC determines that an album is "incomplete" that it could somehow tell you WHY it considers it to be incomplete. Maybe add a little "Explain" button in the text field next to the Complete Album value field. And it would pop up a dialog box that would spell it out for you.

It can get rather tiring at times to try and figure out why. Especially when an album has complete status, and then one thing you do OUTSIDE of MC suddenly renders it incomplete. And what you did wasn't even to one of the tracks of the album.

To be honest, I kind of lost track of the troubleshooting that happened here.  However, I would love an "explain" button to let me know why MC considers an album to be incomplete.  Or something.  I have been frustrated in the past when 9 of 10 tracks are in folder X, 1 of 10 is in folder Y, they're all tagged properly in MC, but it still returns "incomplete" -- I know to look for this now, but when I was learning, an "explain" button would have sped my education up for sure.

[Valissystem]

Another option would be to force completeness.

I have double albums that I want to regard as a single album (not use "... (Disc 1)" etc. in the Album name). So I tend to use track numbers like 101,102,103 .... 201,202 etc. so that the tracks sort correctly by track number. MC of course regards these as not a complete album.

How do others do this?

[Doof]

I just number them all as if they were all from the same disc. Unless the Album name is actually different in some way (Like Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusion I & II), or there is really something to be gained by seperating the discs, then why should it matter if they're on seperate discs? All that means is that they ran out of space.

[Sauzee]

Another option would be to force completeness

I like that idea. Anyway we could manually alter the caculated field for complete album?  Sometimes I don't have a complete album on my PC deliberately eg because I deleted some tracks I didn't like.

However I would like to tell MC to treat it as a complete album as the album does not require any further attention from me.

The main use of incomplete album is, in my opinion, is to highlight albums where we have tracks missing so that we can fill the gaps.

So it would be useful if we could manually exclude certain albums from this list.

I do this at the moment by renumbering tracks so that there isn't a gap, but it's a not really an ideal way to do it.