You first will enter the Scan Albums dialog. It has following setting":

Scan Directory

Set here the base path where your music is located.

Scan recursive
Set this option when all subdirectories within the specified directory should be scanned

Scan also for Video
Set this option when you also want to add video clips. Before you set this option please first read the following video information page Playing video clips  .

Edit Video File Types
Pressing this button shows you the Video  page of the preferences where you can define the file types you want to look for. The capability to playback these types depends on your installed codecs.

When the AlbumPlayer is ready scanning, it will do the following steps.

1. Check for album.apf files when enabled in Scan for Tracks page in the preferences dialog
2. Check for .cue sheet files when enabled in Scan for Tracks page in the preferences dialog
3. Check for audio files and show the "New Files Found" dialog.

Following sections describe these steps in more detail.

Check for album.apf files

It will check for the availability of an album.apf in the music directory of an album. The album.apf file is a previously exported album information file by the AlbumPlayer. See also Export Album Info to Album Dir . When an album.apf file is found for newly detected files it will ask the user to use this file or to gather the album information from scratch.

Check for .cue sheet files

Each .cue sheet is scanned to detect if tracks should be added. If a track file is added to the album based on the .cue sheet, it will prevent that the track which is referenced is not added as a separate track on its own. 

Note: Cue sheets are often used to contain track indices in one long track file. The AlbumPlayer stores this references in its own database. If the track file was already added while the cue sheet was not there or was not used (because disable in preferences), the track file will already be in the AlbumPlayer database as one long track. Scanning the cue sheet later results in incorrect tracks. The first track will be the whole track file, while the subsequent tracks will contain indices into the track file. To solve this, remove the tracks from the album and then scan again.

Check for audio files

The AlbumPlayer will check for all supported audio file formats. See also: Supported audio file formats

After scanning all directories, the AlbumPlayer will show the "New Files Found" dialog which is an important step in identifying the correct album identifications.

This dialog contains two sections:

• First Step: Determine Album Artist and Album Title.
• Second Step: Find album info

New Files Found - First Step: Determine Album Artist and Title

From both sections the most important thing to do is to tell the albumplayer where to find artist name and album title. Based on this information the tracks are grouped together to an album. To make this a succesful step, it is wise to have your music directory organised in an uniform way so you can let the AlbumPlayer read the artist name and album title from the directory name. Especially when having collection albums containing several artists on one album, you want to keep them together. Identification of an album is based on the combination of the artist name and album title. Using the tag info to determine the album identity can lead to problems with collection albums, because the AP will create an album for each separate artist not knowing the album artist. You can select following strategies:

Artist and Title at one directory level
Very common way to organise your albums is to have them all contained in one directory. Each subdirectory contains just one album and in the name there is artist name and album title separated by one single character. Example:

artist1 - album\01. track1.mp3
artist1 - album\02. track2.mp3
......
artist2 - album\01. track1.mp3
artist2 - album\02. track2.mp3
......

Artist and Title on separate directory levels
Also a very common way to organise your albums is to have all artist directories at one level and having the albums on a second level. Example

artist1\album\01. track1.mp3
artist1\album\02. track2.mp3
......
artist2\album\01. track1.mp3
artist2\album\02. track2.mp3
......

You can also use a more complex directory structure. Then you use the option:

Other directory structure
This is useful for instance, when you want to have the release date in your album name. In that case you can specify this custom structure with a format text. Realise that in the phase of album identification, the release date irrelevant and you only have to tell the AlbumPlayer to skip it. The format text can contain following tags:

• %Artist%
• %Title%
• %Skip%

When you have for example following directory structure:

artist1\(year) album\01. track1.mp3
artist1\(year) album\02. track2.mp3
......

then the format text should look like:

%Artist%\(%Skip%) %Title%\

Note that is very important not to forget the last backslash to specify we have to deal here with a directory path!

The last option is based on tags:

Use file tags to determine Album Artist and Album Title.
This option is not based on directory and not recommended because it is not possible in all situations to identify the correct album even when your file tags are filled. File tags do not have a well defined field containing the album artist. This gives problems with collection albums. There is also no reason to use the file tags in this step because you like to read additional track info from the tags. In this step only artist name and album title is read. In a later stage after album identification the tags are read to complete track and album information.

Auto merge double CD's to one album

When using one of the first three options that determine the album based on directory names gives the possibility to automatic merge double CD's to one album. What you have to do to achieve this, is to create subdirectories named CD1, CD2 etc. in your album directory. The AlbumPlayer will automatically detect these CD's in will only add one album. When you look in detail with the Album editor you will see that the album contains two separate CD's. So for instance you directory structure should look like this:

artist1 - album1\CD1\01. track1.mp3
artist1 - album1\CD1\02. track2.mp3
artist1 - album1\CD2\01. track1.mp3
artist1 - album1\CD2\02. track2.mp3
......

New Files Found - Second Step: Find album info

In this section of the dialog you specify how album information should be gathered after the album is identified. It is useful to select your prefered resources here, but you can also repeat this step later from the collection editor. If you are new to the AlbumPlayer you can select resources which are shown in the New Files Found dialog. Otherwise press the "Advanced Options" button it shows the same dialog with advanced options, which you also get when you select Find Album Info from the Edit menu of the Collection Editor.

The following basic resources can be selected:

Read file tags
The AlbumPlayer will add information from the track tags.

Look for cover in album directory
The AlbumPlayer will open the album directory and look for an image to be used as the cover of the album. You have to go to the "Advanced Options" to specify more precise for which images to look. See also Find Album Info.

Use Amazon.com to find cover art
Look at Amazon.com for cover images.

Use additional resources and more lookup options
If you select this option, the basic lookup options are not longer used and instead the advanced options are used. These are specified using the "Advanced Options". For more details about the advanced options see also Find Album Info.