New customer. Really pretty highly pleased, but there are just a few flies in the ointment. In descending order of annoyance:
(1) WMA supports a tag called WM/PartOfSet to indicate the disc number of a multi-disc set. Media Center doesn't use this tag, however; if the tag is set, it is ignored by Media Center, and if the disc number is set in Media Center it saves it into a tag called JR/DISC#. Can this be fixed?
See also:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/query/dd757974(2) In my library, each album is displayed with a header like this:
[Album] by [Artist] [Year]
[Artist] here is set by Media Center from the contents of each individual track's Artist tag(s)s. If the tracks have different artists, I see "[Album] by Various Artists". This behaviour would be great except that this is what the Album Artist tag is for. If the Album Artist is set, its contents should always be used here.
Example: Double Fantasy by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Each track on the album is by either John or Yoko. "Double Fantasy by Various Artists" is absurd; I should see "Double Fantasy by John Lennon and Yoko Ono". Every other music player of my acquaintance works this way, and Media Center ignoring my Album Artist tags is really rather irksome. Can I do anything about this?
This gets even worse on my Media Center-managed iPod, where albums that MC has decided to treat as "Various Artists" don't even get listed on the iPod's "Albums" menu (it puts them under "Compilations" instead). This is very wrong - I really, really need Media Center to not tell the iPod that these are compilation albums.
(3) Speaking of my iPod, when syncing it Media Center decided that a couple of tracks on one album were duplicates. They really weren't, and I couldn't figure out any way to batter some sense into Media Center short of changing the name of one of the tracks. This isn't a particularly good solution.
(4) I have a compilation album where each track has a different year (the original release date of each track). Media Center displays [Year] as... the average value of all the years? That's kinda weird. I can see a case for it, though. Other music players just use the year from the first track. Neither solution is great, but at least Media Center doesn't assume that every track on an album has the same date.
Why does each track have a different year? Because I should see "Hey Jude" when I search for songs from 1970, and I shouldn't see it when I search for songs from 2009 - but the compilation album should be identified as "Past Masters by The Beatles (2009)".
The only way I see to make this work is with a second tag, let's call it "Release Year", to specify when the compilation or remaster was issued when that's different from the actual original release date. So I'm just daydreaming aloud here. But if Media Center could be made to work with such a scheme... then I'd like a pony with that, too.
(Note that the vast majority of my music is WMA Lossless, in case the tagging scheme is relevant to my comments above.)