I have transferred my music library on to my “My Cloud” and are using the twonky media server to stream it to various devices, Ipad, Smasung TV, Smasung Tab 4. On the IPAD and samsung Tab4 I downloaded WD’s app’s to access the music.
When I sort by “artist” I end up with some albums being Split up because it is using the “track Artist”(not sure if this is the official term Windows Media PLayer seems to call it the “Contributing Artist”) to sort on not the album artist. This causes albums to become split up.
I like to see my music sorted by Album artist then album, and the way it’s doing it now it’s all wonky.
So I figure I have 2 ways(probably more) to solve it :
1: go through all my music with MP3tag and make sure on each album that the artist = the album artist, this will take a fair amount of time and be quite tedious.
2: find a way to make twonky sort by album artist instead of track artist. this should be a lot easier plus I get to keep the track artist information.
I’ve access the twonky server through my browser window (ipaddress:9000) but can’t find any option to sort by album artist, does anyone know how to sort by album artist?
My music library is created by EAC and MediaMonkey, which may use different tags to WMP, so that may be something to consider (I’m pretty sure they use ‘Album Artist’ by default). At worst, you could use MM or MP3Tag to set the appropriate tags. Historically, I’ve entered all metadata by hand, entering only the album artist, album title, date and genres on EAC, and then re-naming tracks (using my own processing scripts), finally importing the tracks into MM, using the default tag inferences in MM, from the filename.
If you use external metadata, you’re at the mercy of whoever created the metadata, and what tags they decided to use… That’s one reason why I’ve used my own metadata until very recently.
Any compilations I have are all created with ‘Album Artist’ set to ‘Various Artists’ (by EAC).
I have Twonky set to ‘Advanced Media Navigation’ mode for the Navigation Tree, which is the default, IIRC. Thus, media clients (e.g. Kinsky) see multiple views of the Twonky database. I set the Compilation Folders string to ‘Various Artists’. If I use the ‘album’ view, compilation albums are complete, and show all tracks by all artists. If I use the ‘Artist/Album’ view, I see a list of artists, and then their individual albums as next level of hierarchy. Alternatively, I can view ‘By Folder’ for the same effect, since my library is physically ordered in this way too.
I guess my library may be different, since it won’t have any tags for ‘track artist’ or ‘contributing artist’, because I’ve kept my metadata simple, and thus only have ‘Artist’ and ‘Album artist’ tags.
I note that, if I view by ‘Artist/Album’, there are 751 albums under the artist ‘Various’…
Re-tagging could be a long process, but, provided you set up the tool correctly, shouldn’t require too much manual effort, since the tools (MM or MP3Tag) should do everything automatically for you; set it going and leave it for a few hours… I’ve not used MP3Tag, but have used MM’s auto-tagging facilities extensively, and they’re very powerful.
I have just found that Forum /entry myself and are reading it. It involves editing some xml files haven’t read too much of it yet. I have also posted the same question on that forum, if I get an answer I will link it to this forum.
