Need help organising my music! - Compilation multi-CD

[alex_ncfc]

I have a problem, mainly with WinAmp for Android, (but not restricted to) but I feel I may need to sort things on my PC first with regards to the tag meta data in the files. Trouble is, I am at a loss.

Say I rip some compilation albums with multiple discs. I therefore have a folder in the My Music tree of:

Compilation album name > Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3

Is there a certain way I can import this into WinAmp so it's all correct rather than the playlist showing:

Track 1
Track 10
Track 11
Track 12
...
Track 2
Track 3
etc etc

Also something infuriates me about when I put music on my phone. When I put the music into folders and use WinAmp for Android's Album Washer, it will get most of the tracks but then it will say a random amount of them aren't detected as part of the album (even though they blatantly are - they all have the exact same meta data!)

Does WinAmp have any sort of organiser tool to allow you to manage all this stuff?

Many thanks

Alex

[MrSinatra]

I'm not sure what exactly you're doing or what exactly your problem is or what the cause is, but i do this and it works for me:

one cd = one folder of songs

i put an albumartist value on all tracks.

just doing those two things will probably help you get things a lot straighter.

[MarkRH]

This is how I generally handle a multi-disk set:

\MP3\Electronic\Paul Oakenfold - Global Underground, Oslo\

Is where I store the songs on my PC for this multi-disk Album. (In this case each track also has a unique artist.) Then within it, files are named like:

(album artist) - (album) - (track) - (track artist) - (title).ext
Paul Oakenfold - Global Underground, Oslo (Disc 1) - 01 - Artemis - Elysian Fields.mp3
....
Paul Oakenfold - Global Underground, Oslo (Disc 2) - 01 - Bedrock - Forbidden Zone.mp3

This matches the meta data within the file as I use mp3tag to create the filename based on the tag information. In this case, both CDs have an album-artist of Paul Oakenfold and the Artist is whatever the track artist is. Yeah, dealing with these Electronic mix CDs can get a bit tricky. In the ML, it does kind of treat (Disc 1) and (Disc 2) as separate albums as the album names are technically different. I also use a leading zero for my track numbers so Windows and what not will sort them better.

Can't really help with the Android stuff since I'm still using a "dumb" phone.

[MrSinatra]

that's a good point, I don't use disc tags at all, instead I put things like:

"
album name (CD1)
"
or
"
album name (CD2)
"

directly in the album tag field.

[MarkRH]

Yeah, I don't mess with Discnumber tags either.

Oh, for a more normal CD.. files are saved as:

Metallica - And Justice For All - 04 - One.mp3

In this case both the Artist and Album Artist tags are set to Metallica but I don't make the file name contain a redundant track artist. There's no right or wrong way to do this.. just whatever makes sense to you and programs/devices you play the songs with. (I have, or I did, certain devices that do not like UTF tags so I write them using the ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 format in mp3tag.)

[MrSinatra]

I use EAC and it allows for one method for VA comps, and another for normal. a search of my posts will find extensive explanation of my protocol for tagging and file naming.

however, I think UTF-16 (Unicode) is superior to 8859-1

[MarkRH]

Yeah, for more modern devices and OSs, UTF is probably better to use but I have some things that play MP3 files that just don't support the format so I make it easier on myself and use ISO.

[alex_ncfc]

Thank you for all the replies, people. Very helpful.

I think I've managed to sort most of my albums out by using TagScanner (I had tried this before but never noticed the Tag Processor which allows you to look up the albums online on Amazon, etc and then modify them according to the data they have - this appears to have fixed a large number of them) I have also been adding disc numbers and track numbers using a leading zero like you have suggested.

I do have some rogue albums though that whatever I save them as in TagScanner (after acquiring the data in the Tag Processor from the internet) they just won't save certain things, like album art for example, and it will just stay empty. Seems a bit hit and miss with some albums.

One of the things that prompted all this was Windows 8's media player saying "Your music files aren't showing correctly. Click here to learn how to fix this" - and after clicking, it went to a webpage which said nothing of the sort about how to fix the problem - helpful!!

It's quite rewarding when you get some of it all sorted though. Even though I still have some way to go.

[Aminifu]

I like that TagScanner shows more tags by default than Mp3Tag. But sometimes different data is shown by these apps for the same tag in the same file. When this happens Winamp usually agrees with what Mp3Tag shows and sometimes with what TagScanner shows. Any ideas on what could be causing this?

[micronicos]

Originally Posted by Aminifu

I like that TagScanner shows more tags by default than Mp3Tag. But sometimes different data is shown by these apps for the same tag in the same file. When this happens Winamp usually agrees with what Mp3Tag shows and sometimes with what TagScanner shows. Any ideas on what could be causing this?

How does Tagscanner compare with Tag & Rename? I find the file renaming system on T&R jolly good.

[Rovastar]

I don't really understand the problem here for the desktop player. I have a load of multi dance compilation 'cd's'

I have mine all tagged via Musicbrainz using the Musicbrainz Picard tagger and it all works fine.
I have mine in 1 folder rather than xyz disc 1 and xyz disc 2, etc (I did think thi swas teh modern way of doing things to be honest)
And for filenames (irrelevant for winamp reading it as it reads the tags) 1-01 artist - track, 1-02,..2-01,2-02, etc

I set the DiscID tag so they have the disc number set.
Winamp understands this but I had to set winamp up I think so it sorted it automatically in some cases. I have attached a screenshot.

Now if you are just talking about the Andriod version well that last I looked it had a fair few bugs where it didn't look at the albumartist, etc so for compilations it was next to useless.

[Aminifu]

Originally Posted by Rovastar

And for filenames (irrelevant for winamp reading it as it reads the tags) 1-01 artist - track, 1-02,..2-01,2-02, etc

Winamp will use tags if tags are present and the metadata is provided in a way that is understood by the app's parsing design logic. Most tags are just text strings and various tagging apps or services (or users manually) determine the content for these strings in different ways.

Winamp can also try to 'guess' certain info from the filename if some or all of the tags are missing. I think a certain kind of guessing is the default configuration, but I disabled all these guessing options so long ago I don't remember.

I've never been able to find a style guide for what Winamp expects to 'see' in each tag (or a comprehensive list of which tags are supported for each supported format). There are loosely followed ID3 standards and the vorbis standard allows for "what you see is what you get", so there is no 1 'right way' to handle this stuff. Over the years, I've worked out a scheme via trial and error that works for me. This flexibility is one of the things I like most about Winamp.