Amazon Cloud Drive can do an amazing job in organizing your MP3 uploads according to the album and artists, sometimes though when you upload your existing MP3 collections, its MP3 uploader may fail to recognize songs with different artists from the same album. Just an example here, I uploaded a collection of songs from an old CD Lifescapes: Relaxing Classical I converted a few years ago using Sony Sound Forge (I just ripped the CD and saved each song as an mp3). And each song was categorized by the artist and uploaded to several albums with the same name. What’s worse two albums were slapped with some random thumbnails.
Incorrectly uploaded to multiple albums
Here’s a simple tip that will only take about 5-10 minutes to fix the problem. The problem usually lies with incomplete ID-tags. What we see right away is there’s no track number information. And there are other missing information that we cannot see unless we check the Properties of the files.
MP3 collection with incomplete ID-tags
So the first step we want to do is to highlight all the mp3 files you want to upload (left-click on the first song on the top and press shift and left-click on the last song at the very bottom of the list), then right-click your mouse on any of the song and go to Properties.
Find an ID-tag Property called Album artist and type in “Various Artists” without the quotes. You may also want to edit other metadata that are supposed to be the same for all mp3 files. Here you want to make sure you only edit all metadata for the group but not for the individual file. For example, in my case here, I already have the same Album name “Relaxing Classical” so I don’t need to update it, but you may see (multiple values) on your compilation for Album. If that’s the case, you want to update it using the same name. Click OK after you’re done.
Edit group metadata
Next, we need to do a rather tedious work, that is to pick each mp3 and assign a track number. If you don’t have that information, you can do search from Amazon or other search engines. I usually find most metadata and album artwork from Amazon.
Edit individual metadata (assign track number)
When you’ve finished assigning track numbers, your mp3 collections should look similar to this. And you’re pretty much done.
MP3 files with assigned track numbers
Before you re-upload your mp3 to your Amazon Cloud Drive, you might want to delete all the botched uploads first just to clean your cloud space.
Now you’re album should show correctly.
Corrected MP3 album upload
* The artwork was added separately using dBpoweramp ID tag editor to all mp3 files before they were uploaded.
Hope it helps.
