Various Artists & Windows Media Player 12

[vassie]

Hello

I am trialing TMS 5.1, and as much as I love it, I cannot get it to show albums with Various Artists properly, WMP12 to WMP12 is fine, however, TMS51 to WMP12 looks like this...

http://img18.yfrog.com/img18/1213/jgf.png

Is there any way I can fix this? As, if I can, I will purchace a licence straight away!!

Thanks

Ben

[PeeBee]

The way I deal with multi-artist, compilation CDs is to have the Album Artist tags set to Various Artists and the Artist tag for each track set to the actual artist. Then I have a view set up for Album Artists which will show compilations under Various Artists, and a view for Artist which will show the tracks for the individual artists including those on compilation CDs. If you edit the tag properties in WMP you can set up separate Artist and Album Artist tags. If the Album Artist tags are empty then Twonky uses the Artist tags instead so you need to at least populate the Album Artist tags on compilation albums.

There is an option as well to list the names of folders with compilations in, which will then be ignored when looking at an Albums view (I think that's what it does but it was a while ago when I tried it before switching to the above method).

(Edit: BTW, the above is easy to do in v4.4.18 but you have to set up the views yourself in v5.x - and things changed again for the final release of v5.1)

Hope that makes sense

PB

[mbuzina]

I have the same issue with Version 4.4.8 from my LivesStation.

I have done the following:
added BAND and ALBUMARTIST Tags to my mp3 files but they still show up as a spread album. They live in a folder called Compilations and the Compilations Folder setting is: "Compilations,Sampler". Browsing the collection from the Web looks fine and in TMM it is also OK.

To me it seems that WMP 12 expects a tag called BAND (not Albumartis, but close) which it uses for grouping. Twonkey does not seem to provide this metadata to WMP. Can this be improved (pretty please)? Or is there a way to adapt the metadata that Twonkey sends?

[vassie]

I have some compilation albmus, and they have "Various Artists" in the BAND tag, however, WMP12 splits them up via TMS



WMP12 looks like this



If I can fix this, I will buy a licence, it is driving me mad!

[vassie]

(Edit: BTW, the above is easy to do in v4.4.18 but you have to set up the views yourself in v5.x - and things changed again for the final release of v5.1)

Hope that makes sense

PB

How easy in 4.4.18?

[PeeBee]

(Edit: BTW, the above is easy to do in v4.4.18 but you have to set up the views yourself in v5.x - and things changed again for the final release of v5.1)

Hope that makes sense

PB

How easy in 4.4.18?

Very easy!

4.4.x allows you to set up views by using drop-down boxes as opposed to hacking xml files in 5.x.

I think that the problem might actually be with WMP12, though. I now have a Win7 PC with WMP12 and it ignores the views set up in Twonky and just uses its own views, which include Artist but not Album Artist. I get the same behaviour as you do now for albums with multiple artists even when I set the Album Artist to "Various Artists" for each track.

PB