time life flower power & screwed up tags

[wyckedcombo17]

First of all, im not a hater but these tags are making me angry. i manually redid all the tags, but now i have more problemos. I just bought the time life flower power pack and i cant figure out how the heck to get it in there to relate to the right one. instead of being the individual titles, etc., there generic. ie: instead of Born To Be Wild/Steppenwolf/Flower Power: Born to Be Wild (Disc 1), it is now: Born Tow Be Wild/Various Artists/Time Life's Flower Power disc 12. the cover isnt right, they have no artists, im mad.
please give me ideas. they dont even have to work, im desperate
-Dan

[HarlequiN]

This is a cut and paste of a post I made to a similar query in a different thread (in the General Zune Software help forum). I hope you understand that it's a pretty long post, so I didn't want to have to basically type it all out again (I'd link to it, but I don't have enough posts yet ). You'll have to modify to your exact problem, but the general idea is here:

Album names do not an album make - zune uses two fields to define an album, one is the album name (which you already have set), the other is album artist - which is what appears under the name of the album in the album view. So, to define an album you need to make all the album artists appear as "Various Artists" or whatever. This of couse means you lose the name of the actual artist, which is not cool, but there's a seperate Artist field that can be used, that Zune doesn't show in the album view. The files for the album also have to be in the same folder (I think).

You can edit these tags in Zune software itself, but going to the list view (click next to browse on the upper right of the album lisitng panel) and changing the tags there - you'll see that in this view you can see both the Album Artists and the actual Artists listed. Sadly this doesn't seem very reliable, and the software seems to have a number of small problems with certain names, and remembering what you did over time (I think it stores a lot of the information in a file somewhere, rather than changing the actual Tag in the MP3, but I'm not sure).

A better way to do it is to get MP3Tag, which is a lot more user friendly when it comes to changing a lot of names, though it doesn't look as pretty. Once you've made the changes in there the Zune software will pick up on them and (in theory) will update your zune with the information once you resynch. I found I sometimes had to remove and re-add an album to get the Zune to recognise changes on occassion, but it was pretty rare. MP3 Tag also allows you to move the actual MP3's around your hard drive, so that you can place the various singles in the same folder, which Zune software does not seem to do.

So, to sum up, what you need for your album to show up as an album is something like this:

Album: Zingles
Album Artist: Various Artists
Artist: Chumbawumba
Location: C:\Zunestuff\Music\Zingles\

Creating custom album art for your "virtual" album should probably be done through zune software though. Once it's there as a single entity just right click on it and select "Add album art".

You can get MP3Tag from the mp3tag site - just do a search on mp3tag in Google and it'll be the first link.

[Jon]

Do not select the Automatically update media information in the Zune Software Settings.