[punkadiddle]

I'm currently setting up my first installation of XBMC on Ubuntu and am thinking about how to organize my music folders to work best with XBMC.

XBMC automatically scans the media tags separately for each single file and creates the database navigation. It creates an album entry for every album name it finds which is correct from a technical point of view.
I have a lot of individual files that have complete meta data. Since these files are individual (often just 1 or 2 files from an album) I wouldn't consider these as an album. I end up with a very long list of albums with many I don't recognize by name.
For me an album is defined not only by it's name but also by all of it tracks. What I would like to have is all (complete) albums in the album list and individual tracks in a track and artist list.

I do not want to remove the album meta-data from the individual files as it allows to download cover art.

I can think of several ways to distinguish full album from individual tracks:

1. album name matches folder name
   
2. > 80% of all tracks of the album are available
   
3. albums are stored in root folder A, while individual tracks are store in root folder B
   

Is this possible somehow? I guess variant 3 could be easily defined by a regular expression.

Is there a general best-practice guide on how-to organize music? I found one for videos at lifehacker.com.

[jmarshall]

How can we possibly know that >80% of tracks are available?

[jhsrennie]

This is a purely personal view not a recommendation, but I find that file view works best for albums. I suppose that if you're not really interested in albums then library mode allows you to pick and choose tracks from different albums, but if like me you like to listen to a whole album then file view works very well. You can still switch to library mode as required e.g. to find recently added albums.

JR

[d'Wooluf]

One possibility:

Create your own custom fields for album title and track number. Copy the contents of the 'official' album title and track number fields to these custom fields as backup before blanking the official fields. The information is there if you need it in the future, but will not be scraped.

[punkadiddle]

How can we possibly know that >80% of tracks are available?

When the number of tracks field is filled it could be done - but not when each track is handled separately.
A regular expression on the path would work per track.

[punkadiddle]

This is a purely personal view not a recommendation, but I find that file view works best for albums. I suppose that if you're not really interested in albums then library mode allows you to pick and choose tracks from different albums, but if like me you like to listen to a whole album then file view works very well. You can still switch to library mode as required e.g. to find recently added albums.

JR

File mode: that's what I currently use because I'm used to it. But it seems the iPod style database navigation is the way to go since it's also used through uPNP. I like using my Android phone as remote control.

[jmarshall]

Most tracks don't have the "total number of tracks" filled in. We could perhaps do something if the information was present (though exactly where that information is placed would have to be thought through somewhat...)

[d'Wooluf]

Would you really have to rely on heuristics though? You could allow the user to scan music into the database as either albums or individual tracks in the same way as user can scan video into the database as movies or tv series. Assuming you thought it was important enough to make the distinction.

[punkadiddle]

Would you really have to rely on heuristics though? You could allow the user to scan music into the database as either albums or individual tracks in the same way as user can scan video into the database as movies or tv series. Assuming you thought it was important enough to make the distinction.

I came to that idea when reading through the advancedsettings documentation. Having it in the user interface would be even simpler to use and find. It's also already done for videos to select the right kind of scraper for movies, series and music-videos.

[jmarshall]

Would it instead be fair enough to assume that those that want to do this (which will generally be those who appreciate organisation) would be organised enough to put enough information in the tags to make this doable (i.e. the total tracks of the album)?

Cheers,
Jonathan

[d'Wooluf]

Would it instead be fair enough to assume that those that want to do this (which will generally be those who appreciate organisation) would be organised enough to put enough information in the tags to make this doable

I think I appreciate organisation (too much probably) and most of my tags do *not* have the Total Tracks tag set. Freedb doesn't seem to supply this information explicitly and that's how I get my tags in the first instance. I never really saw a need to fill it in manually.

I'd still go for the option of being able to turn off reading of Album and Track Number tags when music folders are scanned. These fields would be blank in the xbmc music db, would be assumed to be not part of an album, and could then be displayed appropriately.

Then again, I'm pretty much an album guy and this issue doesn't really affect me.

Cheers.

[X1pheR]

I'm facing the same problem. Did you ever come up with anything for this?