Adding music to the library

Preparing your music collection for scanning into your Music Library may be the most time consuming portion of getting it up and running, but for most users it will probably be well worth it. Tools to Manipulate Music File Tags There are several tools out there that will allow you to manipulate music ID tags. Most commonly available media players allow users to manipulate ID tags (Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp etc.) An example of a free ID tag manipulation program is MediaMonkey. If you want to download album art thumbnails for multiple albums at a time, try Album Art Aggregator. A tutorial has been started on a piece of software called Tag&Rename. Tag&Rename will write ID3 v1 and v2, WMA, Ogg, APE, and Flac tags with information fetched from amazon.com and cddb. It is an efficient way to tag albums and fetch album art thumbnails. HOW-TO: Using "Tag&Rename" (the MP3 tag-editor and organizer) to manage your music tags

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Embedded Album Art

XBMC supports embedded album art in music files. File formats that do not support embedded Album Art images: APE, Ogg, and Flac tags do not support embedded images. To have files of these formats display an image you must either flag the directory a single image by naming an image folder.jpg and placing it inside the directory or if, for example you have song.ogg you must name the image (jpg or png format) song.tbn. For more information on thumbnails see the Thumbnails portion of the manual

Compilations and Multiple Artists

XBMC 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). Multiple artists can be specified in "Artist1 / Artist2 / Artist3" format, and if no Album Artist tag exists, XBMC will use the first (primary) artist as the Album Artist, unless all tracks from the album contain the same multiple artists.

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:

1. Identifies albums based on Album name alone in the folder and groups the songs that have the same Album name together as an album.
2. Runs through each album's assigned songs. If there is 2 or more tracks with the same Track number, the group of songs must come from 2 or more albums, so the Album name is ruled out as a possible compilation.
3. If any of the songs assigned to the Album name have an Album Artist tag, then XBMC assumes the user knows what they're doing, and this album is also ruled out from being a compilation.
4. If two or more songs assigned to the Album name then have different primary artists, then the Album name is considered to be a group of songs from a compilation, and the Various Artists" tag is assigned as the album artist.
5. Otherwise, if all the songs have the same primary artist but don't have the same full artist list (eg a song or two has an additional artist) then the album is assigned the primary artist as it's Album Artist.

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