Getting Media Player 10 to Organize Albums Properly
April 26th, 2005 - No Comments YetI have spent more hours than I care to share trying to figure out how Media Center Edition 2005 and Media Player 10 combine efforts to organize the music on my computer and subsequently list it in MCE2005. After much reading and a lot of trial and error, I found that Media Player is responsible for organizing all of your music. Unfortunately, if your file tags were not provided by software that MP10 likes, then you are going to have some work ahead of you, like I do. Or, if you have album or artist information that is slightly different for the same artist, Media Player and MCE will not display them in the proper place (which was driving me crazy). An example of this is if you have two albums by The Beatles. When you ripped one of the albums to MP3, Media Player looked up the album info and found that “The Beatles” was the artist that created the ablum. When you rip the second ablum, Media Player looks up the information about the album and finds that “Beatles” is the artist name. Even though Media Player is good about displaying The Beatles and Beatles next to each other (ignoring the word “The” when displaying by artist alphabetically), it is not smart enough to merge the two together because the file tags to not match.
So, you have to go in and manually edit the artist name on the track file tags so that they match the others. This is very easy to do in MP10 as you can select all of the files for a given artist and edit the artist names all at once. However, if you have 1500+ artists in your database, like I do, this is a PITA. Maybe someone at Microsoft will read this and make sure the next update for MP10 includes the ability to merge these two sets of files.