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[lowjoel]

I'm hosting a media library on my home server, with MC16's media server functionality. The album artist and contributing artists fields have been correctly detected in Media Center (and verified by connecting to it using my client computer) but the generated list in Windows Media Player on the same client (as well as other clients running WMP11) contains the contributing artists of each album, resulting in repetition of albums.

Am I missing something?

[BartMan01]

If you have MC16, why are you using WMP11?  Just install MC on that machine and use it to access the library from your main install.

To your issue, find out what tags WMP is looking at for those values and then see what MC says is stored there.

[lowjoel]

Hmm, that would be plenty of machines to install MC on, and manage too. The media server is for everyone in my house to access, and everyone's got 2 or more devices.

It would seem that WMP is looking for the Album artist tag (like it does on local media libraries) to group albums together. This behaviour seems to occur naturally in WMP as well when the Album Artist tag is blank; however MC's UI reports that the Album Artist tag is correctly populated.

[BartMan01]

Nothing really to manage other than updates if you use a shared library - maintain the single library and access that from the other machines.  That is what I do with my HTPC, just open the shared library on my main media machine.  But to your question:
use a program like this http://www.id3-tagit.de/ to see what is actually being stored in the tags.  Makes troubleshooting much easier.  I never trust what programs tell me because there are only guidelines on how to use the tags, not enforced standards.  Also make sure that MC is set to store tags in the file in addition to just the library.

[lowjoel]

Hey, thanks for your input. I've checked using mp3tag, the album artist tags are stored properly in the file.

One thing I notice though, WMP seems to say that the "Artist" (i.e. album artist) and "Contributing artist" lists are the same, when they should be different. I'm hypothesising that either WMP is querying for the wrong field, or MC is returning the wrong data when queried.

[BartMan01]

Sounds like WMP is combining the multiple fields if your external tagging program is showing that just the artist is in the Album Artist field.  I've never used the 'Contributing Artist' field myself, and I really don't use WMP for anything other than occasional playback so I can't confirm.

One thing to be aware of with MC is that it usually uses the 'Album Artist (Auto)' field and leaves the actual 'Album Artist' field empty unless explicitly entered.

What I do for multiple artists is the follows:
Add a custom 'Artists' field that is a multi value field.  Then in the 'Album Artist' field I only include the primary artist (if I enter at all).  In the 'Artists' field I include all artists on each track.   Then in my views in MC I swap 'Artists' for 'Artist' in most views.  I also enter the 'Artists' value with the 'sort order' name (L, F; name, the; etc) the way I want it to be treated.

Then when I search for 'Artists' I get all tracks that include that artist.  For example there is a version of 'I'm Afraid Of Americans' that is David Bowie w/ Nine Inch Nails.  With my 'Artists' views I get that track if I select 'Bowie, David' or if I select 'Nine Inch Nails'.

[lowjoel]

There was one particular album with the contributing artists left blank, and WMP reported the album to be by an Unknown artist.

So I'm narrowing it down to either WMP requesting the wrong information, or MC providing the information in a wrong manner (or wrong information altogether). I'd like to check this, is there any debugging flags I can set to sniff the output? Or should I be doing some packet sniffing to see what's being exchanged?

[BartMan01]

I just tried doing what you are doing.  What I see in 'Contributing Artist' in WMP11 is what is in 'Artist' in MC16.  Based on a quick Google search, that is what I would expect to happen.

There is no 'Contributing Artist' tag in MC16 so if you are seeing one there it must be a custom tag.

[lowjoel]

Yes, Contributing Artist in WMP is the same as Artist in MC. The problem here is that WMP uses Artist (= MC Album Artist) to group albums. If you go to album view in WMP, and if your WMP Contributing Artist (=MC Artist) tags are different for separate tracks in the same album, you'll find the same album appearing multiple times in the albums view (shown in my initial screencap)

[lowjoel]

Bump -- anyone has got suggestions?

[BartMan01]

Bump -- anyone has got suggestions?

From my quick search earlier, it seems this has been a problem with WMC for the last several revisions.  Your choices as I can see them are:

Don't use WMC - use MC with it's library sharing features (my recommendation).
Retag all your files to be WMC ready and then alter your views in MC as needed to accommodate your tagging needs.

[lowjoel]

Sorry for being persistent.

I took a few hours today to do some debugging. I hooked up Wireshark to intercept all packets to/from the Media server. As a comparison, I set up a separate Windows Media library and shared some files over UPNP and intercepted those packets too. I concede that the best would be to examine output for the exact same two albums, but at this point I can't get WMP to do so... it's grabbing separate albums. But, to a large extent, I think my analysis should be valid.

Observations:

• MC16 uses "<upnp:class>object.item.audioItem</upnp:class>"; WMP12 uses "<upnp:class>object.item.audioItem.musicTrack</upnp:class>"
• MC16 uses "<upnp:albumArtist>Mariah Carey</upnp:albumArtist>"; WMP12 uses "<upnp:artist role="AlbumArtist">Mariah Carey</upnp:artist>".
• MC16 only adds a <upnp:albumArtist> tag when the Artist field in the library is not equal to the Contributing Artist. WMP12 always generates an album artist reference (which may explain why albums are split in my screenshot above)
• A separate <desc> tag is generated by WMP with an embedded XML fragment which describes a specific MS extension.
• WMP12 generates non-standard Microsoft tags. See except:

Code: [Select]

<desc id="artist" nameSpace="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:WMPNSS-1-0/">
    &lt;microsoft:artistAlbumArtist&gt;Mariah Carey&lt;/microsoft:artistAlbumArtist&gt;&lt;microsoft:artistPerformer&gt;Mariah Carey&lt;/microsoft:artistPerformer&gt;
</desc>
<desc id="author" nameSpace="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:WMPNSS-1-0/">
    &lt;microsoft:authorComposer&gt;[Unknown Composer]&lt;/microsoft:authorComposer&gt;
</desc>
<desc id="Year" nameSpace="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:WMPNSS-1-0/">
    &lt;microsoft:year&gt;2008&lt;/microsoft:year&gt;
</desc>
<desc id="UserRating" nameSpace="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:WMPNSS-1-0/">
    &lt;microsoft:userEffectiveRatingInStars&gt;3&lt;/microsoft:userEffectiveRatingInStars&gt;&lt;microsoft:userEffectiveRating&gt;60&lt;/microsoft:userEffectiveRating&gt;
</desc>

[/li]

• On the same token, MC16's Ratings do not work in WMP12. It would seem that MC16 uses "<pv:rating>5</pv:rating>", WMP expects a <microsoft:userEffectiveRatingInStars> tag enveloped in a <desc> (see excerpt)
  

I'm hoping a fix to improve WMC support can be pushed by the developers. I'm willing to experiment and test out fixes if the MC devs are willing to debug this with me.


Edit: I managed to obtain the data, I've updated the except.[/font]

[lowjoel]

Bump please.

[Matt]

Media Center 17 puts upnp:artist in the DIDL.

[lowjoel]

I'm still seeing the same behaviour with WMP12/MC 17 (build 71). I'll be working on it when time permits... somehow.