2CD LogoMulti disc albums in Media Center

I recently added my FLAC music col­lec­tion to my Media Cen­ter box, but one of the last few things bug­ging me about the Media Cen­ter inter­face is that it does not respect the Disc Num­ber. I prefer not to have a dif­fer­ent album name for the second disc, and i also prefer to keep discs sep­ar­ate. Today I acci­dent­ally stumbled on a solu­tion, thanks to a mis-tag­ging of a double-cd album.

Using Mp3Tag (down­load­able for free) it is pos­sible to add cus­tom fields to those that can be edited. I dis­covered that Media Cen­ter recog­nises a FLAC tag called “ALBUM ARTIST” (note the space which should­n’t be present — the val­id tag title should actu­ally omit the space). If I set this field to the artist name for just one of the 2 discs (the second disc is bet­ter so they are shown in cor­rect order) Media Cen­ter shows the 2 discs separately.

The only down­sides I have found to this approach are, 1: Media cen­ter does­n’t dis­tin­guish between the disks by name, the album just appears twice, and 2, this will only work for double-cd albums, not 3 or more discs

Any thoughts — drop a com­ment below

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2 Comments

JSJon Scaife

Indeed, I think I saw that thread (or sim­il­ar) when I was look­ing for a solu­tion. I don’t think there is a way to deal with 3 or more disc albums, but at least the above “hack” works and does­n’t seem to have any adverse effects.

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JJustinTArthur

This has been brought up in Microsoft’s for­ums sev­er­al times, and unfor­tu­nately the answer from Microsoft is that they aren’t plan­ning on fix­ing this defect. They sug­gest a hack whereby you use exist­ing sort­able tags to hold disc order metadata

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