[nubbage]

Hi All,

Maybe I'm just bad at searching the internet, but I've spent 2 days looking for a solution to a pretty major problem, and I'm astounded I seem to be the only person in the world with it.

I just did a clean install of Windows 7 Pro. On my old box, I had one huge folder with all my thousands of MP3s, which I copied into "My Music" on my new Win7 box.

When I started up WMP for the first time, I set the options to automatically download info from the net, rename files based on tag info, etc, as I had never bothered to do anything like this before to organize my mp3s. Immediately WMP went to work updating my mp3s. Good stuff.

Now to illustrate the problem. Lets use the example of 5 Aerosmith songs I have from the album Get a Grip. When WMP was all done with scanning my mp3s and updating info, everything appeared fine in WMP. That is, I could scroll to artist "Aerosmith" and then to the album "Get a Grip" complete with cover art, and see the 5 songs. Again, good stuff. Then I clicked "Show file location" and noticed something weird...

WMP player had automatically created the folder My Music\Aerosmith\Get a Grip. Awesome. Problem is, the "Get a Grip" folder only had 4 songs, despite the fact that in WMP I could see FIVE songs in the album. I searched for the 5th song and noticed that it was still orphaned in the base My Music folder. Why the hell hadn't it been moved with the rest? When I did some poking around, I found the answer:

The 5th song didn't have "Album Artist" set, whereas the other 4 songs DID have it set to Aerosmith. Umm, seriously? Now multiply this issue over hundreds of albums....

First of all, why the hell would WMP do this? That is, sort the VIEW by Artist, but sort the FILE SYSTEM by "Album Artist" ???

Second, how can I solve this? My first idea was just to download a tagger program to en mass update all my mp3s that have blank "Album Artist" to just set Album Artist = Artist. Fail, despite dozens of tagger programs, none have this simple functionality. My second idea is to make WMP organize the file system based on Artist, not Album artist. Again, no such option exists.

Any ideas? Why am I the only human on the planet with this problem??

[stantley]

The reason you couldn't fix the data with a tag editor is that Album Artist is a field that's only stored on the WMP database and isn't written to a tag, so the only way to edit that field is through WMP.

Whenever you update your music information with an internet lookup the results are mixed, something will always get screwed up whether you use WMP or other software and then to use that data to change folder locations compounds the problem. You should only lookup an album at a time so you can fix any errors manually. I personally never let any software move my files around, it's asking for trouble.

My best advice is to not use WMP to store your music, the only thing I use WMP for is for viewing video. Try MediaMonkey it does a much better job of organizing music. It's also a good idea to use a tag editor so for that try Mp3tag.