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
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.
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