# WMP11-How can I group "various artists" albums?



## Imola Ghost (Sep 15, 2007)

I don't know if this is something I'm not correctly tagging in my music. But, whenever I'm browsing "albums" in Windows Media Player 11 it shows like 12-15 album covers for 1 album.

This relates to any album that has various artists on it. Why does WMP11 do this and how can I straighten this up?


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## Jon1001 (Jun 28, 2007)

In media player, when you have a compilation album, it uses 2 different artist tags, 'album artist' and 'contributing artist'. Album artist will just be 'Various Artists' as it is the name of the artist who made the album. Contributing artist is who the songs are by so each of the songs on a compilation album will have different contributing artists. It sounds like you have you songs listed in order of contributing artist. If you change them to be in order of album (by clicking on the album tab), it should group the songs on those albums together. Hope this helps.


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## Imola Ghost (Sep 15, 2007)

I clicked on the "album" header and all it did was arrange the albums by alphabetical going either A-Z or Z-A. So this didn't work as I want it to. I appreciate your help as this has really bothered me about WMP11.

I've got about 120gb's of music and quite a few are Soundtracks, Compliations, & Tribute albums that have many different artist on it. I hate that mp11 shows the same album cover many times over depending on how many artists are on that album.

I don't even see a "contributing artist" tag when right clicking a song in wmp11? So they don't even give you an option to change those. Another thing is that changing my "album artist" to "various artists" it will mess up other mp3 players song information while displaying it on the screen. Take for instance if I change all of my "various artist" albums to say "various artists" in the "album artist" field then I wouldn't know who was playing what when loaded on my Iphone/Ipod. It was just show "various artitsts".

I just checked Itunes and my Tag & Rename and neither one of these support a field for "contributing artist"?

I don't get their reasoning behind not grouping these albums.


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## stantley (May 22, 2005)

If you have 120GB of music I wouldn't use WMP at all. WMP is an OK media player, but the music database isn't very good, especially version 11. If you have iTunes and an iPod why not just stick with iTunes?

If you don't like iTunes try Mediamonkey.


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## Imola Ghost (Sep 15, 2007)

Well I don't necessarily like WMP11 but I don't have much choice when my music is networked thru the xbox 360 with Media Center. That's just how those 2 machines talk to on another and mp11 organizes the albums that way.


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## stantley (May 22, 2005)

If you have Vista you're stuck with WMP 11, but if you have XP you could go back to version 10 which works much better.


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