Double album shows as one album with tracks in wrong order

Question

I bought a digital album from Amazon which was originally a CD double album with bonus disc. When I downloaded it, WMP displays it as a single album with two #1 tracks, two #2 tracks - the play order is first song from first 'disc', first song from second 'disc', etc.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with Amazon's packaging of the tracks - metadata - etc, but how can I fix it? Would creating two folders on my PC and splitting the files work, or is WMP too 'clever' to be fooled by such things and would still see it as one album?

This is how the files show on disk:

Answer 1

WMP doesn't natively support the Disc Number tag so it will indeed display all discs intermingled as a single album. You could however install the Windows Media Player Plus! plug-in, which can add Disc Number support to WMP:

Answer 2

I've had the same problem with Windows Media Player. The solution is to change the track numbers of the songs on the second disk, so they are sequential in reference to the first album e.g. if the first track of the second disk is the 12th song of the double album, you have to change the track number from "1" to "12."

You can do this by going to the folder where your songs are kept.

Right click on the song.... Click on "Properties"..... Click on "Details".... Scroll down to the line for "#".... Click on the existing number e.g. "1" for the first track on disk 2, and change it to the correct number in the sequence for the double album, "12" in my example above..... Click "OK".... Repeat for the rest of the tracks on the second disk....

Answer 3

Here's a hack that might work in a pinch: If you are using Windows Media Player to play files named according to disc-track (as iTunes does), you can sort them by file path:

Right-click the column header, select Choose columns..., and check File path.

Close, and select the File path header to sort.