2012-11-16, 23:17
I'm new to XBMC, and would like to start by thanking everyone who contributed to XBMC's development for creating such a wonderful piece of software. I absolutely love my new XBMC-running HTPC.
That said, while scanning in my video library was a breeze—I had it originally organized in the same structure that XBMC was designed to look for, and most of my titles weren't too obscure—my music library is frankly a horse of a different color. Basically, it's a mess.
I decided I would start by organizing and scanning in my Christmas music, since the holidays are coming up, and those are the songs I'll most likely be sharing soonest. Every year, when it comes time to trim the tree and make a mess decorating, I dust off my Christmas tunes and play them for the family whilst we deck our halls. I've collected a nice chunk of rock and metal carols along with some clever Christmas parodies over the years, and if I don't bring out my music, I get regaled by the traditional snooze-fest my mother brings out instead—hence why I've taken over. In the past, I've simply dumped the whole mess on my old little iRiver PMP-120, hooked it up to some speakers and hit “play all.” This year, however, I was hoping to put my new HTPC to good use instead, thinking it'd be neat to have some nice visualizations and artist/album/song info displays to go along with the festivities.
Unfortunately, while I had very little trouble scanning in my Twisted Christmas (Twisted Sister), and Ho! Ho! Hoey! (Gary Hoey) Collections—nice, complete, stand-alone albums—I've run into a snag with most everything else.
The problem is that most of my Christmas collection consists of compilation disks of various—apparently obscure—artitsts. Most of these albums won't scan in, and while I've been able to successfully dig up album details manually for custom .nfo files to accompany them, XBMC is fighting me on it.
To save space, as my music/video collection as a whole is particularly large, I wanted to avoid having duplicated files in my library. To accomplish this, I decided to organize my file structure in folders by artist/album/song.file. I figured each song would have exactly one primary artist, and one album it was originally released on—thus, each file would exist in only one place. I also have a few (legal) torrents in my collection, and had hoped that I could scan them into XBMC without breaking them, so I could continue seeding them.
I've had to give up on the latter, as tagging them via .nfo files was unsuccessful. While XBMC would populate unpopulated tags with info supplied by the .nfo files, anything that was tagged directly on the music files themselves—ie: artist, album, track, year, genre, etc.—trumped whatever was in the .nfo file. No matter how many times or ways I cleaned, imported, or flat out deleted the entire music database (mymusic*.db), I couldn't change those fields without manual database edits—which would be lost should the data ever need to be rescanned or updated. I finally caved and broke my torrents. One supplied an inaccurate year tag on all the files, and I was loath to have bad data in my database. As for the others, I couldn't add “Christmas” to the list of supplied genres, and needed to have a way to filter these songs out during the rest of the year, lest I wind up having Christmas in July. While this is a minor issue in my Christmas collection—I can live with breaking a couple Christmas torrents—I'm worried that I may run into similar issues when it comes time to add in my main music collection. I really don't want to have to break *all* my torrents.
My second problem cropped up with the compilation albums. Since I was storing my music by artist/album/song.file, I had the compilation albums broken up over several artist folders, each artist folder containing a folder for said compilation, each containing whatever song(s) they'd contributed to it. I had hoped that XBMC would be able to scan each song in and recognize that it was part of the same album, but thus far, this attempt has failed miserably. I can't scrape info on much of these, as XBMC scrapers can't find them, and I'm not sure where I'm supposed to put the .nfo file to get this to work—if it'll even work at all. I had assumed that XBMC, being a media library, would be able to organize my music by tags, regardless of it's file structure, as breaking free of file structure is one of the major points of having a program based library. If so, I must be doing something wrong because no matter what I do, the library refuses to assign the compilations to “Various Artists,” and instead, lists each album separately for each track as CompilationAlbum/TrackArtist times however many tracks are in the album. I've got one that lists the same album 20 different times, as it has 20 different tracks, each with their own artist.
I've tried having duplicate, identical .nfo files in each artist/compilationAlbum folder.
I've tried having a main .nfo file in the artist/compilationAlbum folder containing the first track, with no .nfo files in the remaining tracks' folders.
I've tried having a main .nfo file in the artist/compilationAlbum folder containing the first track, with blank .nfo files in the remaining tracks' folders.
I've tried having a main .nfo file in the artist/compilationAlbum folder containing the first track, with .nfo files in the remaining tracks' folders that point to the main .nfo file.
I've even tried having no .nfo files to see if it was the .nfo file causing the problem.
I'm so frustrated with this that I've considered caving and setting up a separate compilation folder to store these together, as it does work as long as they're all in the same folder. There are two reasons I'd like to avoid this approach, however.
The first is that many of these albums contain tracks from other albums that have been added to the compilation. I don't want to have two (or more) copies of the same song, as this takes up space that could be used for other songs—or movies/tv shows, given enough duplicates.
The second—and main reason—is that, when I inevitably add my main music collection, I'll want to be copying music to my phone to play on the go. (AT&T raped my unlimited data plan, so I can't stream Pandora anymore. :\ ) Since I tend to grab similar sounding artists together, it would be easy for me to simply grab Artists A, B and C from my file structure and toss them on the phone. I don't, however, want to go digging through a messy compilation folder, wondering where all of ArtistX's songs are. Unless XBMC has a built in “Send to mobile device” function that I've overlooked, allowing me to send songs to my phone directly through XBMC without having to look through an abyss of folders, this would be a nightmare given the sheer size of it—and I probably wouldn't listen to half my music if forced to store it this way.
Lastly, I'm stumped on two minor, albeit annoying issues.
The first is that I can't seem to figure out how to link songs to multiple albums. I have all my songs tagged to the album they were originally released on, but if I want to bring up a later album that also has said song on it, said song doesn't show up, as it's linked to the original album.
The second, is the smart playlist feature.
Thus far, I've tagged all my Christmas music's genres as “Christmas, Holiday, <insert various genres here>”. I've set up a playlist that plays everything except anything tagged with the “Holiday” genre. This works great for shuffling my full music collection sans holiday stuff that I wouldn't want popping up in, say, July.
I also created a playlist to play all music tagged with “Christmas.” This allows me to play all my Christmas music while allowing for other holidays, such as “Halloween” to be added to the library. (I wouldn't want to play Monster Mash, for example during Christmas, but it'd be great to have a playlist with it for Halloween parties.) This works just fine too.
However, My Christmas music is further tagged with either “Parody,” “Rock,” “Metal,” or a combination thereof, depending on the song. There are also a few songs that aren't any of those three that somehow managed to weasel their way into my collection. This is where I ran into a snag.
I wanted to make two more playlists: one for parodies and one for rock/metal, depending on who I was going to be playing songs for. Obviously, I wouldn't want to play some of my parodies for my more conservative relatives, as there are a few songs in there that would probably get me disowned. Nor would I want non-rock/metal in my rock/metal playlist.
Unfortunately, while setting up the parody playlist posed no problem—just play anything with “Parody” in it—the rock/metal playlist threw me for a loop. It seems XBMC only lets me set the playlist to either match all rules, or only one rule. Some of my Christmas music is labeled “Rock,” and some is labeled “Metal,” depending on the song. I need a playlist that will play songs that are [Christmas AND (Rock OR Metal)], but I can't find a way to do this, as the playlist will either match all rules, ruling out everything, as nothing is labeled “Christmas AND Rock AND Metal,” or it will match only one rule, playing everything that is either Christmas OR Rock OR Metal. The latter behavior works as long as I don't scan in the rest of my music, but will inevitably pull non-Christmas songs, as the majority of my main collection consists of rock and metal.
That said, while scanning in my video library was a breeze—I had it originally organized in the same structure that XBMC was designed to look for, and most of my titles weren't too obscure—my music library is frankly a horse of a different color. Basically, it's a mess.
I decided I would start by organizing and scanning in my Christmas music, since the holidays are coming up, and those are the songs I'll most likely be sharing soonest. Every year, when it comes time to trim the tree and make a mess decorating, I dust off my Christmas tunes and play them for the family whilst we deck our halls. I've collected a nice chunk of rock and metal carols along with some clever Christmas parodies over the years, and if I don't bring out my music, I get regaled by the traditional snooze-fest my mother brings out instead—hence why I've taken over. In the past, I've simply dumped the whole mess on my old little iRiver PMP-120, hooked it up to some speakers and hit “play all.” This year, however, I was hoping to put my new HTPC to good use instead, thinking it'd be neat to have some nice visualizations and artist/album/song info displays to go along with the festivities.
Unfortunately, while I had very little trouble scanning in my Twisted Christmas (Twisted Sister), and Ho! Ho! Hoey! (Gary Hoey) Collections—nice, complete, stand-alone albums—I've run into a snag with most everything else.
The problem is that most of my Christmas collection consists of compilation disks of various—apparently obscure—artitsts. Most of these albums won't scan in, and while I've been able to successfully dig up album details manually for custom .nfo files to accompany them, XBMC is fighting me on it.
To save space, as my music/video collection as a whole is particularly large, I wanted to avoid having duplicated files in my library. To accomplish this, I decided to organize my file structure in folders by artist/album/song.file. I figured each song would have exactly one primary artist, and one album it was originally released on—thus, each file would exist in only one place. I also have a few (legal) torrents in my collection, and had hoped that I could scan them into XBMC without breaking them, so I could continue seeding them.
I've had to give up on the latter, as tagging them via .nfo files was unsuccessful. While XBMC would populate unpopulated tags with info supplied by the .nfo files, anything that was tagged directly on the music files themselves—ie: artist, album, track, year, genre, etc.—trumped whatever was in the .nfo file. No matter how many times or ways I cleaned, imported, or flat out deleted the entire music database (mymusic*.db), I couldn't change those fields without manual database edits—which would be lost should the data ever need to be rescanned or updated. I finally caved and broke my torrents. One supplied an inaccurate year tag on all the files, and I was loath to have bad data in my database. As for the others, I couldn't add “Christmas” to the list of supplied genres, and needed to have a way to filter these songs out during the rest of the year, lest I wind up having Christmas in July. While this is a minor issue in my Christmas collection—I can live with breaking a couple Christmas torrents—I'm worried that I may run into similar issues when it comes time to add in my main music collection. I really don't want to have to break *all* my torrents.
My second problem cropped up with the compilation albums. Since I was storing my music by artist/album/song.file, I had the compilation albums broken up over several artist folders, each artist folder containing a folder for said compilation, each containing whatever song(s) they'd contributed to it. I had hoped that XBMC would be able to scan each song in and recognize that it was part of the same album, but thus far, this attempt has failed miserably. I can't scrape info on much of these, as XBMC scrapers can't find them, and I'm not sure where I'm supposed to put the .nfo file to get this to work—if it'll even work at all. I had assumed that XBMC, being a media library, would be able to organize my music by tags, regardless of it's file structure, as breaking free of file structure is one of the major points of having a program based library. If so, I must be doing something wrong because no matter what I do, the library refuses to assign the compilations to “Various Artists,” and instead, lists each album separately for each track as CompilationAlbum/TrackArtist times however many tracks are in the album. I've got one that lists the same album 20 different times, as it has 20 different tracks, each with their own artist.
I've tried having duplicate, identical .nfo files in each artist/compilationAlbum folder.
I've tried having a main .nfo file in the artist/compilationAlbum folder containing the first track, with no .nfo files in the remaining tracks' folders.
I've tried having a main .nfo file in the artist/compilationAlbum folder containing the first track, with blank .nfo files in the remaining tracks' folders.
I've tried having a main .nfo file in the artist/compilationAlbum folder containing the first track, with .nfo files in the remaining tracks' folders that point to the main .nfo file.
I've even tried having no .nfo files to see if it was the .nfo file causing the problem.
I'm so frustrated with this that I've considered caving and setting up a separate compilation folder to store these together, as it does work as long as they're all in the same folder. There are two reasons I'd like to avoid this approach, however.
The first is that many of these albums contain tracks from other albums that have been added to the compilation. I don't want to have two (or more) copies of the same song, as this takes up space that could be used for other songs—or movies/tv shows, given enough duplicates.
The second—and main reason—is that, when I inevitably add my main music collection, I'll want to be copying music to my phone to play on the go. (AT&T raped my unlimited data plan, so I can't stream Pandora anymore. :\ ) Since I tend to grab similar sounding artists together, it would be easy for me to simply grab Artists A, B and C from my file structure and toss them on the phone. I don't, however, want to go digging through a messy compilation folder, wondering where all of ArtistX's songs are. Unless XBMC has a built in “Send to mobile device” function that I've overlooked, allowing me to send songs to my phone directly through XBMC without having to look through an abyss of folders, this would be a nightmare given the sheer size of it—and I probably wouldn't listen to half my music if forced to store it this way.
Lastly, I'm stumped on two minor, albeit annoying issues.
The first is that I can't seem to figure out how to link songs to multiple albums. I have all my songs tagged to the album they were originally released on, but if I want to bring up a later album that also has said song on it, said song doesn't show up, as it's linked to the original album.
The second, is the smart playlist feature.
Thus far, I've tagged all my Christmas music's genres as “Christmas, Holiday, <insert various genres here>”. I've set up a playlist that plays everything except anything tagged with the “Holiday” genre. This works great for shuffling my full music collection sans holiday stuff that I wouldn't want popping up in, say, July.
I also created a playlist to play all music tagged with “Christmas.” This allows me to play all my Christmas music while allowing for other holidays, such as “Halloween” to be added to the library. (I wouldn't want to play Monster Mash, for example during Christmas, but it'd be great to have a playlist with it for Halloween parties.) This works just fine too.
However, My Christmas music is further tagged with either “Parody,” “Rock,” “Metal,” or a combination thereof, depending on the song. There are also a few songs that aren't any of those three that somehow managed to weasel their way into my collection. This is where I ran into a snag.
I wanted to make two more playlists: one for parodies and one for rock/metal, depending on who I was going to be playing songs for. Obviously, I wouldn't want to play some of my parodies for my more conservative relatives, as there are a few songs in there that would probably get me disowned. Nor would I want non-rock/metal in my rock/metal playlist.
Unfortunately, while setting up the parody playlist posed no problem—just play anything with “Parody” in it—the rock/metal playlist threw me for a loop. It seems XBMC only lets me set the playlist to either match all rules, or only one rule. Some of my Christmas music is labeled “Rock,” and some is labeled “Metal,” depending on the song. I need a playlist that will play songs that are [Christmas AND (Rock OR Metal)], but I can't find a way to do this, as the playlist will either match all rules, ruling out everything, as nothing is labeled “Christmas AND Rock AND Metal,” or it will match only one rule, playing everything that is either Christmas OR Rock OR Metal. The latter behavior works as long as I don't scan in the rest of my music, but will inevitably pull non-Christmas songs, as the majority of my main collection consists of rock and metal.