What makes a folder an album?

[RalphShnelvar]

Let's say my music directory on my Android device is Music.

 

I have a folder

   Music/Ralph_Music

 

In Ralph_Music I have a bunch of songs I copied there.

 

I'd like this collection of songs to be an Album. 

 

How do I make that happen?

[flyingdutchman]

By editing the album mp3 tag you can set these tracks to show as one album. There are quite a few posts on which tagging apps are useful. Myself i use audiotagger on android but it is probably easier to do this on a pc and then copy to your device.

[RalphShnelvar]

Bless you!

 

I had looked and looked and looked and could not find this very simple answer.

 

Is there a technical overview anywhere about how Android deals with Albums and Playlists. That is, is there an overview anywhere where the information you just gave me is described?

[andrewilley]

It's not so much Android itself in this case as Poweramp. However the methodology of using embedded tags to define extra 'metadata' about any file is a very general process and is used pretty much anywhere that MP3 files are used.

 

I guess the most useful tags for most people are Title, Artist, Album, Track Number, Year, Genre, and cover art. Once you have defined these for all of your music files, any software that reads those same files will know how to group your music into subgroups such as individual albums, everything by one artist, everything released in one year, etc.

 

I use a PC program called TagScanner for batch editing tags by the way, and then copy the updated files back to my phone, in case you want to try out different options.

 

However I do still try to keep the directory structure on both my PC and my device tidy by using suitably named folders (e.g. Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/SongTitle.mp3). It's easier to find and work with the files outside of music players that way.

 

Andre

[flyingdutchman]

To add to Andre's response and cover the android/technical aspect, when android scans your media it reads the mp3 tags (aka metadata) and populates its relational database. For instance, in a table called artists you would find the artist key and artist name. There are a number of tables which all link. Apps access this database using sql to return data. Poweramp builds and maintains its own database as this gives it more flexibility and independance from the android media database.