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.

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Music File Tags
Your audio files MUST have a valid ID tag for them to work properly in the XBMC Music Library. There are third party applications available for download from the internet that allow you to add and manage ID tags in your music files.

For many categories, such as genres and artists, XBMC supports multiple values in the one field. By default it uses the character sequence " / " to divide the entry into multiple values. This divider may be changed via advancedsettings.xml.

Artist Tags - Resolving 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). This is the "Album Artist" tag (in ID3 this is represented by the "TPE2" tag; in vorbiscomment (ogg) files "ALBUMARTIST", "ALBUM ARTIST" and "ENSEMBLE" are all supported). Multiple artists for either a track or album artist can be specified in "Artist1 / Artist2 / Artist3" format.

If no Album Artist tag exists, XBMC will use the first (primary) artist from the tracks as the Album Artist. Essentially we do a string comparison of all the track artists, and assign the common artists as the Album artist. This is generally the TPE1 tag in ID3.

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, and we assume the additional artists are guest artists.

Ratings in ID3 tags
Ratings in ID3 tags are read via the POPM field, and (if this doesn't exist) in a custom (TXXX) field named "RATING". For the RATING field, we accept 1-5 as valid ratings. For the POPM field things are more complicated, as there is no established standard in place. We currently most closely respect what Mediamonkey does, and also have some support for what Windows Media Player 11 does. The POPM tag takes a value from 0..255, with 0 meaning no rating, 1 the worst, and 255 the best. We currently map these as follows:

Embedded Album Art
XBMC supports embedded album art in files with ID3 tags, WMA tags and MP4 tags only. It does not support embedded album art in APE, Ogg or FLAC tags currently. To have album art for these formats, see the Thumbnails portion of the manual.

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 ID3 tag manipulation program is MediaMonkey.

If you want to download album art thumbnails for multiple albums at a time, try Album Art Aggregator or Album Art Downloader.