Help me out, this is driving me nuts!

I've ripped some music to my PC and in Media Player it's all fine and dandy... BUT...

Using the music feature through the Xbox 360, I connect to the PC and get a list of folders for my albums I have on the PC.

The problem is, some of the music is in the wrong folder even though it's right on the PC.

For example, my Divine Madness album, though showing as one album in Media Player and all being in one folder on the PC, shows as two Divine Madness albums on the Xbox 360. SO I've got tracks 1-13 in one, and then the remaining 11 tracks in the other.

Forever Faithless is the same but here I've got 1 track all on it's own and, according to the Xbox 360, I've got a second Forever Faithless album with the rest of the tracks in it.

I've check the meta-tagging and the album names are the same for all tracks, the sequencing is correct and artist names etc are all the same for each track in each album...

To further confuse things, I went through and deleted a bunch of songs I don't like any more and was left with a gaggle of tunes from various albums. I lobbed these into folders according to the style of tune and then, selecting all the tunes in each folder I assigned a meta-tag album titles to each set of tunes... so all the dance tracks are from the album 'Dance' etc.

Except now I have four albums called 'Dance' on the damn Xbox 360 with the tracks spread across them...

What the hell am I missing???

Nick, off the top of my head I believe the music structure is based on the Media Player Library and not the folder structure in Explorer.

If you load up Windows Media Player, organise your music in the built in library and get it how you want it so your albums are all together and so forth. If they're not, use the tag editor to get them straightened out. That's how I did it on mine and now all is honky doory.

Nope that's not it. All the files are in the same folder on my PC and within MP.

Advanced taggin has them all with the same album, but to no avail.

I'm getting quite angry about this now.

I had a similar problem porting music onto a windows mobile handset. Within mediaplayer check the Album Artist tag and see what it's set to on the different tracks. This tag only seems to be able to be changed within media player and if it is set differently between tracks causes the multiple folders issue seen above. Note that this is a separate tag to the Artist tag and if you have mediaplayer set to update details from the internet it will often autopopulate this tag if you play an individual track leaving the others set to blank.

Nope it's not the Album Artists tag either.

If I select ALL the songs in the folder that are from the same album, then right click and select properties, I can see a details tab, which is the same info as tagging and I can change this info. If the info for a group of songs is different, it's says "Multiple Values" in that field but if the entry is the same for all the songs, it has the value or entry in there, in this case, the Album Name Divine Madness and Artist Madness etc... the ONLY place where it says multiple values are in the track title, the track number and the file name...

BUT...

There is one thing I thought of. The Xbox 360 connects to the PC through Media Player 11 and not Windows Connect so, what about if I ran the "Apply Media Information Changes" option from the Library drop-down?

I've no idea if it'll work but it's a worth a go... and that's what's happening now but it takes a bloody long time.

Nick, try the 'Advanced Tag Editor' in Windows Media Player instead of right clicking the files and choosing details in explorer.

Load up Media Player, go to Library, choose Folder view, navigate to your folder of mp3s, highlight the whole album, right click and choose advanced tag editor. Then see if Album, Artist and Album Artist match up.

It's a long shot but give it a go just in case.

Yeah, done all that, still no joy.

It's just finished that Media Info update thing, so I'm gonna look and see if that fixed it.

What I've done is shift a load of files from one drive to another, so Media Player was reporting a load of duplicate files, the INfo update thing has removed those, so I'm hoping it's also refreshed the tagging which it's reporting to the Xbox 360.