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fnwc
Senior Member
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Hello,
I was wondering if anyone has a large music collection (7072 albums, 119,250 tracks) they're managing through XBMC. A lot of the music managers I've tried in the past choke when dealing with extremely large sets of data.
I've begun the process of preparing my files for XBMC, and I just wanted to see other people's experiences before I get too far.
I haven't really found a way to easily remove an existing album (in case I need to fix the files externally) or adding a single album manually through XBMC, and it seems like running an update on a library that large would be prohibitively expensive. I might just be missing something, though.
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Navigate to the album in file mode.
Context menu -> Scan to library.
Voila!
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fnwc
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Thanks! Is there a similar way to remove albums?
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Scan the parent dir to get rid of an album that's gone.
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Just out of curiosity, how long did it take to add all that music to your library?
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garyi
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Sadly the scrapers work really poorly for music section so your library will look like mine did, a mess. I did spend the time over two days to manually download all the fanart but it soon fell to rat shit.
I do not recommend music in XBMC for this reason, its very disheartening to see sooo many blank spaces, and in some cases for some of the most famous and influential artists/albums of all time let alone obscure stuff.
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garyi
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Thanks for that I have put your scrapers in, is there any settings I need to do on XBMC end?
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fnwc
Senior Member
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Yeah, I've been waiting for a good external music manager and there don't seem to be any.
I'm hoping that when UMX is eventually released and supports music, this will solve my issue.
Like you, I have this need to have everything in order and want as much of my music to be tagged properly. While xbmc does scrape music, when dealing with a large collection it can be unwieldy to use the xbmc UI to do so, especially when you have to fix something.
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I always recommend that all you do is get your tags sorted and scan WITHOUT net based lookups enabled. This is why they're disabled by default.
All the net based lookup stuff does is get extra information about artists and albums - it does not replace your tagging information. This can be done AFTER all your music is already in the XBMC library.
Once your tags are sorted, then you can experiment with scraping additional data.
I agree with you, however, that most of the net-based sources for music are a bit of a mess (either they have great info but a crappy search system, or a great search system and crappy info). Talisto's combined scraper seems to be the best around at this point.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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I have scanned my 70,000 track collection and XBMC handles it very very well.
The only problem I found was the with various artists for one album. If you had 10 different artists, for one compilation album, XBMC will how 10 different albums, one for each artist. The way to combat this, is to use the 'Album Artist' field in the mp3/flac tag.
Now, I have tried to search for linux based mp3 tag editors which allow you to manipulate the Album Artist field, but I cannot find any. I use Winamp, since it handles batches of files so well.
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