Windows Media Center & Tags for Your Music

In this day and age I’m sure a lot of people have a large collection of music on their PC’s. Me being the computer geek that I am, I spend a lot of time behind my PC and obviously have a neat collection of music sitting on my hard drive. The day came however that I wanted to use this music on my home cinema system in the livingroom because let’s face it, the speakers there completely outperform the – in comparison – shitty soundsystem on my computer.

As it happens I’m not your average computer geek because I’m also a gamer, which makes me an ultra super mega computer geek in some cultures. And because I’m a gamer I happen to have an X-Box 360 standing by in my livingroom. And wouldn’t you know? Microsoft is the greatest because you can tell your X-Box to connect to the Media Center on your computer and stream the music from there. The indexing takes some time if you have tons and tons of music, but when it’s done you can just sit on the couch, look for an album and press… wait a minute where’s that folder I had there?

Yes, like about every other multimedia device out there (be it an iPod, MP3 player, MP4 player or whatever) Windows Media Center (and subsecuently the X-Box 360) use MP3 tags to identify which song goes into what folder and is connected to which album. If all the songs in the same folder don’t have the same tags then Media Center is going to disregard the fact that they are in a folder together and just throw them all over the place. And come on, who bothers editing the tags on an MP3 file when they rip the music off their completely legal store bought CD? Nah! You just throw that MP3 file in there with the other MP3 files you ripped from that completely legal store bought CD!

However if you do not want to spend ages finding five songs that are supposed to go together in an album you might want to consider propperly tagging your music from now on. With the right software it’s pretty easy and fast to do. Tagging one album takes less then five minutes and it will save you such a headache when you load them up on your MP3 player later! Just my little piece of advise concerning music.

Robin