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[Junglist_Refugee]

This is a little long winded, but it seems to be working perfectly for me.

Not all of the below steps are necessary, but I will just let you know what I did.

Firstly, backup your music - just incase you mess it all up ( or just use a test folder of mp3s for now)

- install itunes
- make a new folder outside your curent mp3 diesctory, call it somethiong like:"Re-labeled Music"
- go to Edit / Preferences in iTunes and change the location and tick boxes as shown:



- close itunes
- open your My music folder within My documents and delte any content from the iTunes folder
- open iTunes
- Drag & drop your whole MP3 collection onto itunes
NOTE: this will copy your whole mp3 collection to the new folder destination - make surte you have enough space - THIS WILL NOT COPY ACCROSS EXISTING ALBUM ARTWORK!
- Once this is done, iTunes will have orgainised your music into Artist / Album ect with appropriate folder hierarchy that MCE likes (important!)
- close iTunes

- next we have to twaek Windows Media Player a little bit
- open : C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Local Settings\Application Data\MS\Media Player
- clear all content from this folder
- open Windows media player (gay I know, but its only to help us for now)
- Import new music (Re-labeled Music) into Windows media player
- the reason for this will be shown in the next step!
- close Windows Media Player with 100% of music is added.

- download & install Album Art fixer (free) http://www.avsoft.nl...xer/default.htm
- http://www.avsoft.nl...ArtFixSetup.msi
- this is by far the fastest & easiest way to tag your music for MCE
- THIS WILL CORRECT THE DREADED "UNKNOWN ARTIST" BUG WITH MCE
- The database that this application works off is Windows media player / windows media center, so when the music is organised via iTunes & imported into WMP, it picks up ALL albums and lets you correct any field you want.
- It took me about 30 mins or so to do 200 albums

- When you have corected all tags, you can clear the cache of WMC:
- open : C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Local Settings\Application Data\MS\Media Player (on your Media Center PC - I am using VMware......)
-clear all contect from this folder
- open WMC
- Add you music

Good Luck!

[Junglist_Refugee]

113 views, and not 1 thanks?

 

your welcome!

[-FourDoor-]

http://mediamonkey.com/

I use it all the time to re-tag my mp3s and add album art to them. I actually use it before importing other misc music albums into itunes as it makes it easier to add album art to itunes.

Just highlight the album tracks then have it be auto-tagged using Amazon or via file name.

Edit: Nevermind, you were trying to get album art to show properly within MCE. Disregard my post. Thanks for the link to the MCE album art fixer

[Junglist_Refugee]

QUOTE(p$ilocybin @ Jan 7 2006, 09:26 PM)

thank you but one question..uhm...why would ms make you install itunes to fix this mp3 problem? theres got to be another way..

Not all of the below steps are necessary, but I will just let you know what I did.

the Album Art Fixer wil do it all, if your music is already well organised.

[oswald]

I just use Windows Media Player to fix the tags.  You can sort your collection by album artist or album name etc, then fill in the blanks for mp3's that don't have tags.  Sounds like alot of work, but it isn't.  My MP3 collection is at about 70gb and it didn't take long to fix up the mp3's that didn't have proper tags.  This method works well because you don't need to tag stuff that already has it.  Ev

Instructions:
Open up Windows Media Player, if you haven't added your MP3's to its library do so now by going to Tools, Search for Media Files.

Once its done adding all of your music, go to the Library Tab and select All Music.  Then, Click on the Artist column in the listing of all your music, you'll notice it sorts it by Artist.  It will list music without an artist tag first.  Fill in the missing data (you can select several songs at once).

Do the same thing for the Album and Genre columns.

Also, below All Music, select Album Artist, and look not just for blank Album Artist entries, but UNKNOWN as well, fix those, and then select Genre and look for blanks and UNKNOWNS.  Fix those as well.

When you're all done, go to Tools, Process Media Information now.  This may take a few minutes.  When you're done, you're done.  All your MP3's will have good tags.  When you add new music to your collection, every so often, rescan them in Media Player and look for blank and UNKNOWN tags again, clean them up and Process Media Information now.

It does pretty much the same thing as the originally posted method, but it's all in one app, and you have more manual control over your tags, rather than itunes figuring out what it thinks the tags should be.  This is good for things like custom genres.  I have a genre called "Good for Games", any track i think would be good for playing games I tag with that genre, then on my 360 I just select the Good for Games genre and I'm ready to play.

Hope this helps someone.

[djdoconthebox]

I was sad enough to use up some free time and enter in all my MP3 Tags manually Didnt realise software could do it for you, the question is does it put the songs in the correct Genre Category?

E.g. Does it put Darude Sandstorm into the correct category of Trance or does it do a stupid thing like some software does and put it in Rock?

DJ

[DeepBlue]

Hands down one of the best ID3 Tag managers out there, and it's Free (as in Beer):

ID3-Tagit

Links in to FreeDB for Album lookup and population, etc.

Should solve all of your tag problems.

The issue I have is that the 360 plays my playlists out of order, that is, if the playlist has:

1. Song A
2. Song B
3. Song C

It could play it B, C, A, or some unknown order.

If I can make another recommendation to the thread author and others, ditch iTunes, as it is SUPER lame for manging music.

I bought this for my iPod music managing:

Anapod Explorer

Has album art support, video, the whole nine yards, but most importantly (for me), is Windows Explorer interface for drag/drop, folder synchronization and multi PC support.