Does W8 organise music by artist or album artist?

[FireZealot]

EDIT: For clarification: My core plan is to get the music app to organise albums by album artist, but use song artist for artist view. I.E For the "Songs for Japan" album, I'd have only one album visible in album search, but I could see the one song each artist contributed under their individual sections and not a separate "various artists" artist. I could do this with my iPhone...

Hi

I was wondering if the Music app organises content by individual song artist, or album artist. For example, I have a number of compilation albums that have a number of individual artists. The album artist is "various artists" as I find iTunes has a tendency to bug out and make multiple separate icons if they dont have the same album artist.

Thing is, I tend to get a "various artists" column in the artists section, which is annoying. (and yet some songs "slip through" with their own data? Even those in the same album?). I never had this problem with the iPhone, though I suppose it's because they used the same music structure.

Secondly, when adding music via windows explorer, do I have to post it in with the artist folder? In other words, can I just copy paste in "XYZ album" into the music folder, or do I need to separate it by artist. (which obviously makes pasting in compilation albums a pain)

Thanks,
FireZealot

EDIT: For more info, I went into the metadata of my files. For the most part it is correct. Yet sometimes it will split albums in half, seemingly randomly. In these cases, the album name, artist etc is the same. For some odd reason it wont combine them. I found manually copy pasting over the files SOMETIMES fixed the issues. (and sometimes the second copy paste, etc). FYI, my music is encoded in AAC/m4A. Generally I used the W8 phone 8 program in Windows 8, but I also started using manual copy paste. When I did that I refused to convert my music. (as it prompts, but W8 supports AAC?). Finally, I'm trying out the Windows 8 Windows Phone Metro app, as that seems to be the most reliable? Perhaps the issue is here.

EDIT 2: Sorry for making this less organised. I tried as a test removing the album artist from compilation albums. So just "artist" in the metadata, though it was marked as a "compilation" in iTunes. The Music App just separates all the artists in that album, so I have 10 versions of the same album by different artists, each with one song.

 

[Guzzler3]

Short answer: Yes. Microsoft prefers the "Album Artist" over "Artist" when organizing music.

I am experimenting with good old Media Player right now with my collection of MP3's. I finally decided to try the following settings checked:
"Retrieve additional information from the Internet: Overwrite all media information", "Rename Music files using rip music settings", "Rearrange music in rip music folder, using rip music settings".

I'm going to let it do it's thing, then verify and clean up the tags/album art with MP3Tag, then sync with my phone, to see how things turn out.

 

[FireZealot]

So how did that work out for you?

Do you have any idea how to load compilation albums onto your phone without having "various artists" as the artist?

 

[Guzzler3]

I've been sidetracked with life. I'll report back when I make some progress.

 

[FireZealot]

Any new ideas?

 

[wjhunt]

I'm having exactly the same problem and don't think there's a solution. The core issue is the Windows Phone Music App displaying the album artist field under the Artist tab. If it would just display the artist field there it would be perfect. But as long as it does not do that, we only have two options:

1. Give every song on compilation albums its real artist in the artist field and "Various artists" in the album artist field. I think this is what you and I have already done (I also come from an iPhone and that worked well there). But it's a mediocre solution, because you still have "Various artists" in your artist tab on the Music App. And as a side effect, when you click an artist's name, songs from that artist are missing from the list because they are categorized under Various artists.

2. Give every song on compilation albums its real artist in both artist and album artist field. Then everything would show up correctly in the artist tab on Music App. But in that case your album view gets screwed up, so this is also a mediocre solution.

Conclusion: this can only be solved if Microsoft changes the display in the artist tab on Music App from album artist to artist. Or at least gives us the option to do this.

 

[FireZealot]

Blast, that's what I was worried about... Any idea if there's a way to contact Microsoft, at least post this as an issue we'd like to have fixed? Music is a key component of my smartphone experience, and I have a bunch of mixed albums.

 

[Guzzler3]

Short answer: Yes. Microsoft prefers the "Album Artist" over "Artist" when organizing music.

I am experimenting with good old Media Player right now with my collection of MP3's. I finally decided to try the following settings checked:
"Retrieve additional information from the Internet: Overwrite all media information", "Rename Music files using rip music settings", "Rearrange music in rip music folder, using rip music settings".

I'm going to let it do it's thing, then verify and clean up the tags/album art with MP3Tag, then sync with my phone, to see how things turn out.

Finally, I've finished my experiment. And things have worked out quite nicely. Unfortunately, it took A LONG TIME, AND EFFORT to get there.

Here is what I did in Media Player:
In Tools --> Options,
Rip Music tab, File Name: I set it up on how I like my files to be named (personally I like: Artist-Album-Track-Song title. But you might like something else)
Library Tab, Retrieve additional information from Internet, select "Overwrite all media information", "Rename music files using rip settings", "Rearrange music..."
Exit Media Player.

Now for a bit of technical stuff:
You're going to have to delete Media Player's database of your media stuff. Paste the following in a command prompt
RMDIR %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\"Media Player" /S
(Don't worry, you aren't deleting any of your music, videos, pictures. This is just a directory that Media Player creates for it's own house keeping and database)

Now, you want to make sure your computer won't go to "sleep" or "hibernate" for now. Check your control panel, power settings.

Finally, start Media Player. Your library will be empty, which is good, it will fill with information. You will want to leave Media Player to run, and run, and run. Depending on how big your collection of stuff, it could need to run for a day or two, or three, or four, (seriously I only have about 21 gigs of music, ~5,000 files, and I let it run for 2 days before it finished). You can still use your computer, just don't turn it off, log out, sleep or hibernate. If you do, Media Player goes stupid and you will have a mess. I just kept an eye on the hard drive light on my computer when it quit flashing constantly (only flashing occasionally) I figured it was done.

Also, make sure your internet connection is up. Otherwise this is all for not, since we asking Media Player to update all the data on our music from Microsoft's database.

When it was done, I stayed in Media Player and went through my collection, and started to edit any information I thought was completely wrong (wasn't much, a couple Artist name were missing "The" in the front, and other minor things). Finally I used MP3Tag to make sure all my MP3's had their album art was embedded in the actual file (this took the longest time of all).

Now onto getting my music onto the phone:
I deleted all my existing music off the phone. First I went with Windows Explorer and changed the view options to "Show hidden files and folders, and drives" and unchecked "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)".

Then plug in the phone to my computer, and navigated to "Phone\Music" and found hidden folders of "Album", "Artist", "Playlist", and "PodcastSeries". I deleted the contents for those folders. Then went to the "SD card" on my phone and deleted "Music" and the hidden folders of "Albums", and "Playlists". When I was done, I went into the phone and opened up the Xbox Music app and verified that there wasn't anything there.
Changed the settings of app to "Connect with Xbox Music" = On, "Xbox Music cloud collection" = Off, "Now playing on Xbox" = Off
Disconnected the phone from the computer and rebooted the phone.

Started Media Player, connected the phone to the computer, and then used Media Player to sync my music, and playlists back to the phone (SD card in my case).

Guess what... since I have done all of this, everything is GOOD to GO!!! I haven't had any duplicate songs, messed up information what-so-ever on my phone. The only thing now is I can't get the "Smart DJ" to work on the phone.

 

[Richard Smith5]

Wow Guzzler3. That is some extreme dedication to the cause. I was gritting my teeth to spend some of my Sunday afternoon trying to sort this out, maybe whilst I have a cup of tea and listen to the Cricket, but sounds like you spend a fortnight without seeing sunlight!

Anyone got a solution that doesn't involve going into metadata stasis for the best part of a month?

 

[anon(5340442)]

Give Zune a try, there is not a Windows 8 app, but you can install it on the desktop. I have over 30,000 tracks properly organized on my system using Zune. I have been using it since I got my Zune player in 2007 (that I still use daily, only issue is that the back button stopped working a couple monthes ago).

I dont know if it will solve your problem, but I still find it to be the best music player for Windows 8.

I should also note that I am still using a Lumia 800 and dont use my phone as an MP3 player.