Music library

The Music Library, one of the XBMC databases, is a key feature of XBMC. It allows the organization of your music collection by information stored in your music file ID tag, like title, artist, album, genre and popularity. To get the most out of your music, XBMC needs to have all this information available to it. When your collection is scanned XBMC stores all the tagging information (artist, album, year, genre) in the database, which allows you to efficently search and manage your music collection. If you have never taken the time to tag your music properly, the time is now! Today most media applications and players (iTunes and the iPod for example) organize your music by this ID tag information. Your audio files MUST have a valid ID tag for them to work properly in XBMC's library. There are third party applications available for download from the internet that allow you to add / manage ID tags in your music files.

Preparing your Music to be Scanned

For information on preparing your music to be indexed see: Preparing your Music

Scanning your music

File:Scanning.mymusic.jpg

To start scanning your music change the my music view to 'files'. Then proceed to browse to the location of your music collection and press the white button. This shows The Context Menu menu with various options. Select the entry labeled "Scan folder to database". XBMC will then proceed to scan the selected music-folder or share in the background. Once this is complete you can browse your collection by changing the view to 'Library'. Note that scanning in this example would scan all directories listed including full albums, singles, and unsorted.

Navigating your Library

The library organizes your music into many catagories allowing you to find a specific song using one of many possible criterias. To the right you can see root menu showing the different sections.

File:Library.mymusic.jpg

Searching your Library

The search button is available on the left side of the 'My Music' window, and is also available in the root listing of your music library. Select it to begin your search. A keyboard will popup where you may enter search terms (SMS style with the remote, or just using the virtual keyboard). As you enter more letters, the search will be performed in the background, and results displayed in the search node of the music library. Previous searches are saved, so if you return to the search node later on, it will have the results of your previous search. Artists and Albums are shown on top, followed by matching songs. If the search string you enter is less than 3 characters, then XBMC will just search on the first word of each artist/album/song, else it will do a full text search.

Party Mode

The Party Mode option allows you to randomly play music from your entire music collection based on criteria specified in PartyMode.xml. Simply build a Smart Playlist and save it as partymode.xml in The UserData Folder.

Selecting Party Mode from the sidebar will play ALL music scanned into your Music Library in a random order, that meets the conditions specified in the Smart Playlist.

Remote browsing

To be able to browse the Music Library outside the GUI, like through the webserver, you'll currently have to add a special musicdb:// bookmark, and browse it.

Clean Library

Cleaning up the Music Library can be done via the User Interface Settings, in the My Music Settings with the Clean Library option.