Album Artist View

I've been blogging before about the Album Artist view in My Music. I found out that not all of my album artists were displaying correctly, so I had to sink some extra calories in it.

In general, I like to play music by album. And I want to select an album from a list of artists. The trick is in here: I don't like to have artists in that list that don't have full albums on my harddrive. Hence the definition of album artist. Every album on my harddrive has a single album artist. If the album is a compilation album, the album artist is "Various". If the album contains guest artists or duets, the artist of the particular song can be "Santana featuring Rob Thomas", the album artist is still just "Santana".

The problem is that "album artist" was never formally defined in the ID3 tag definition. So different programs use different solutions. I use MediaMonkey to organize and tag my music, which I would definitely recommend to anyone with more than two mp3's on his pc. MediaMonkey does work with an Album Artist field, and using a plugin called MagicNodes it's even possible to view the database by Album Artist. By meticulously tagging and renaming all the music on my harddrive, I should have my mp3's set up for correct display in MediaPortal.

The configuration screen in MediaPortal that's applicable here is the one for Music Database. The top box indicates where the music shares are that need to be scanned into the database. The first tick box will ensure artists like The Beatles will be listed under B not T. It's important that the tick box for "Treat tracks in an individual folder as an album" is checked, this eliminates the compilation album artists from the album artists list. For folders with mp3's by multiple artists the album artist will show as "various artists"
The two boxes below only affect the generation of thumbnails. I don't like the automatically generated thumbs for artists, so I switched that off. Then, for the database updating you can select to do a full update or only incremental. I found out that even the full update does not overwrite all of the database. If you really want a fresh start, you need to delete the databasefile itself. It's called MusicDatabaseV10.db3 and is located in the MediaPortal\database folder.

So far there's a couple of things I don't understand: I found out that there's still a couple of album artists that don't show up as such in MediaPortal. Nor can I find those albums back under various artists. And how does mediaportal distinguish between an album from B. B. King plus guests and a true compilation album? Does it use an album artist tag or rules to convert artist to album artist? The fact that the database scan uses folder locations seems to suggest the last. Also, I haven't found out when the Auto-update on changes in share comes into action.