Windows 7 Music in Media Centre

[Azhrei]

Question - will Microsoft ever let me choose my music albums via a "Folder" selection, rather than albums, songs, artists and so on? My music folder is very large and very old. I used Foobar 2000 a few months back to search the 'net and apply details and album art to every album. It didn't. The whole folder was a mess. Move forward to Media Centre in Vista and 7 - tell Media Centre to download all available information, and it becomes even more of a mess. For example, in the Albums view, I often see several entries for the same album. The Clannad - Legend album has two entries - one has the main single on it's own, the other the rest of the album. Same goes for the Longest Journey ost, Enigma's MCMXC AD, Labyrinth OST, and so on.

I just finished a two-hour session going into every individual folder in Music and replacing the wrong album art with the correct ones, calling each .jpg "Folder.jpg" as Media Centre requires (why?!). Go back into Media Centre, and yes, some of them now do have the album art that I have downloaded showing up, but some don't. And most of them have more than one entry. I'm just not interested in having the correct details and album art for every song and album as I still play music the way I have been doing for years - adding a folder into whatever media player.

All of this could be solved by Microsoft giving me a folder view in Media Centre, but no. This is why the gigantic music folder on the media pc never gets used, and is just wasting space.

 

[iroken22]

I know that using media player this option is available. I have never used Media Center as i find it unnecessary.

 

[Azhrei]

Yes, but we're using Media Centre for a reason. Neither the mouse nor the keyboard are wireless, we're instead using a remote so we can just flick through films and tv shows with ease. It's just extremely annoying that Microsoft is leaving out this one tiny feature. In Vista and 7 you can see the direction they're going in - in every folder I have with say, photographs, Windows will treat it as a photograph folder. Same with music, documents, and so on. Another thing to anger me with, as I have to go to every damn folder I use often and change the settings to the way I've been using them for years - View > List, Sort By > Type, then Apply To All Folders.

Except both Vista and 7 feature that bug whereby it just tends to forget that I've made that change every now and then and reverts to the default LARGE ICON VIEW FOR RETARDS AND PEOPLE WHO ARE HARD OF SEEING. AND MICROSOFT EMPLOYEES. Oops, kinda went off on a tangent there, sorry. But the problem remains - Microsoft insist I use their system of album, artist, album artist (?), genre, playlists, composers, songs, years, shared... and the music folder continue to go unused because of it.