Overview

Browse all your artists, albums, tracks, CDs, DVDs or playlists, with album art and artist images, detailed artist biographies and their ablum track lisitngs, Select from several display layouts or views and sort the results.  Add artists, albums or tracks to a playlist, or to your favorties list.

Browse by Shares (Explorer Style)

Now you have organized your music, either by folders and files, or by scanning them into the database, you can browse your music to your heart's delight. 

If you organize your music by folders and files, you must use the Shares view:

Browse by Views

if you tag your music and scan it into your music database, then you can use a variety of views and layouts:

If you select an artist, you can display all the albums or single tracks you have for that artist.. If you select an album, you can display all the tracks and press enter to play the track.

Or, at any time you can press the Play button on your remote, or the 'p' key on your keyboard to add the artist, album or track to your playlist.  You may even configure MediaPortal to automatically navigate to the Now Playing window, playlist, or fullscreen when you press play.

Use the Menu Options to choose the display layout, views, sort options, to search music, play a CD/DVD or to navigate to Playlists.

Menu Options  

Access the Music Menu by pressing the left arrow key (in most skins), or hovering a mouse at the left edge of your screen. 

Layouts

Clicking this button cycles through the various layouts or display modes for music:

• List, Icons, Big Icons, Big Icons List or Filmstrip.

Switch Views

Provides the option to change View:

• Shares or Database Views: Artists, Album Artists, Albums, Genres, Years, Songs, Top 100, Favourites, Recently Added
   

Note: Artists, Album Artists, Albums, Genres, Years, Songs, Top 100, Favourites and Recently Added are Database Views  which require that your music files have been added to the music database.  If you use Artist/Album lookup, and the artist or album is found, the file will be automatically added to the database, and the artist or album will appear in these views. You may also add files to the music database using the Scan option on the Context Menu (see below) in Shares view.

Sort by:

This allows you to change the order of the files.

• Name, Artist, Album, Track, Title, File, Rating, Time, Size, Date

You may also define additional sort options and link them to specific views in Configuration > Music

Search

Selecting the Search icon at the bottom of the menu will display a virtual keyboard on screen for you to enter search terms.

Note: If you have installed the Global Search (Search Music) plugin, MediaPortal will automatically use this plugin when you select Search.

Play CD

Plays the CD disk inserted in the CD/DVD drive.

Now Playing

This button will take you to the Now Playing window, which is the ideal display when music is playing.

Current Playlist

If you have added items to a playlist, or previously selected a playlist, this button will navigate to the current playlist.

You may also use F1 on a keyboard to easily switch between your current playlist and Music.

Playlists

This option will display any playlists you have saved, either in MediaPortal or external playlists in .m3u, .pls or .b4u format. To get your external playlists to appear, just add your playlists folder in Configuration > Music  on the Playlist settings tab.

Context Menu Options

The Context Menu options will vary somewhat depending on the current view.

Right clicki an item, press F9 on the keyboard, or the Info/More key on a remotedisplay the context menu with the following choices: 

• Add to playlist - adds the selected item to the current playlist
• Add all to playlist - adds the selected item and all items in the same folder and sub folders to the current playlist
• Play next - plays the selected item after the current track has finished
• Play now - stops the currently playing track and plays the selected item
• Show album/artist info - downloads information and artist or album images from Last.fm and automatically adds the artist/album to the MediaPortal database. 
• Show Playlist - displays the current playlist

When displaying songs or tracks in any view the following context menu options will also be available:

• Add to Favourties - adds the track to your list of Favourties which can be displayed using the Favourites view
• Rating - allows you to assign your own rating to a track

Press F3 on a selected artist, album or track to display the artist or album information or  to download the information from AllMusic and automatically add the artist or album to the music database.

Get Artist/Album Images

There are several ways to download and display artist and album images in Music. There are a number of advanced options in Configuration > Music > Music Database where you can control what images display.

• Folder.jpg - if you use Shares View and organize your folders by Artist > Album > Track
• ID3 Tags - if you have tagged your music files using a music tagger like MPTagThat
• Artist Album Lookup - using the F3 key or Context Menu in Music
• Fanart Handler - will download fanart for all your artists

Customizing Music:

Music can be customized in an almost infinite variety of ways depending on your needs or preferences.  See the sub pages, or go to Configuration > Music.  You may also change some Music Settings directly within MediaPortal.

Related Plugins:

• LastFMScrobbler 
• Lyrics
• Global Search
• Smart Playlists
• Fanart Handler

Related

Tutorials

• Select Views (Intermediate)
• Create Views (Advanced)