Adding music to the library
Why should you prepare your music?
Adding your music to XBMC is easy. This allows you to play your music using XBMC. If you are like most XBMC users you'll want a bit more than just navigate to a album and select a number to play from it. You want more... you want to search for music from a certain artist, genre, etc. If thats the case than your music should be tagged (add meta-information to your music files).
These days most music files already have these tags. But sometimes you're out of luck and need to correct this yourself. In this article we take a look at the best tools to fix music tags and organizing and cleaning your songs.
A well tagged MP3 collection makes everything from organization to playback easier.
Apps to edit music TagsYour audio files MUST have correct audio tags to use the Music Library mode. Without tags you're limited to the fileview in XBMC. There are several tools out there that will allow you to manipulate music ID tags. Consult the homepages of these tools how to tag your music collection. The most populair (free)tag apps are:
Technical Explanation: File tagsSkip this section if you're not interested a technical explanation of this subject. You don't need this information to use what is explained in the previous section.
Artist Tags - Resolving Compilations and Multiple ArtistsXBMC reads the Album Artist tag in ID3, Ogg, APE and MP4 tags and uses it if available to assign an artist to the album (independently of the track's artist information). This is the "Album Artist" tag (in ID3 this is represented by the "TPE2" tag; in vorbiscomment (ogg) files "ALBUMARTIST", "ALBUM ARTIST" and "ENSEMBLE" are all supported). Multiple artists for either a track or album artist can be specified in "Artist1 / Artist2 / Artist3" format. If no Album Artist tag exists, XBMC will use the first (primary) artist from the tracks as the Album Artist. Essentially we do a string comparison of all the track artists, and assign the common artists as the Album artist. This is generally the TPE1 tag in ID3. As many users don't yet use the Album Artist tag, XBMC has an additional filter system for identifying compilation albums, where each track normally has a different artist. As XBMC scans a folder, it does the following:
Ratings in ID3 tagsRatings in ID3 tags are read via the POPM field, and (if this doesn't exist) in a custom (TXXX) field named "RATING". For the RATING field, we accept 1-5 as valid ratings. For the POPM field things are more complicated, as there is no established standard in place. We currently most closely respect what Mediamonkey does, and also have some support for what Windows Media Player 11 does. The POPM tag takes a value from 0..255, with 0 meaning no rating, 1 the worst, and 255 the best. We currently map these as follows:
Embedded Album ArtXBMC supports embedded album art in files with ID3 tags, WMA tags and MP4 tags only. It does not support embedded album art in APE, Ogg or FLAC tags currently. To have album art for these formats, see the Thumbnails portion of the manual. |