Detailed information

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Album Artist

Album Artist

An album artist is a way to group an album by its main artist.

Collections and Volumes

[Note that Collections and Volumes are deprecated features which are bound to be removed and replaced soon]

How albums are interpreted

An album in Helium Music Manager is equal to an item in the Album Browser. All albums are grouped using the Album tag and/or the path the files are located in. This can sometimes produce errors, for example when you have two different Greatest Hits albums in the same folder or if the files of one album are located in more than one folder. If an album is incorrectly split from tracks belonging to the same album or merged with another album you can manually correct this.

Multiple Artists

Multiple Artists

'Multiple Artists' is a term used to refer to how more than one artist is associated with a music track. This can for example describe a collaboration; from a duet to a featured appearance.

Plug-ins

Plug-in types

Helium Music Manager works with several types of plug-in:

Rating your music

Helium offers you a great way to keep track of your music by applying a rating.

Release Types

The Release Type field is used to make Helium Music Manager separate the following record types:

Report Wizard template specification

Below follows a specification of how to create your own template for the Report Wizard.

Supported MySQL setups

MySQL is one of the supported database types in Helium Music Manager. Although we recommend using SQL Express for larger music collections for optimal performance there are cases where a MySQL installation is the better choice, such as when your music is stored on a NAS drive which has MySQL functionality built-in.

Tag compatibility chart

Helium Music Manager supports many different file types (mp3, mp4, m4a, ogg, flac, wma, wav etc). Each file format has its own way of saving tags (meta data) and the fields that can be saved to each individual format greatly varies.

Tag editors

Helium Music Manager has five tag editors; each has its own benefits and characteristics.

Using MySQL as database backend

Helium Music Manager supports three different database backends; Microsoft Access (default), MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. This section describes how to connect to and use a MySQL database backend.

Templates

Templates are used throughout Helium Music Manager to speed up the processing of different tasks. A template contains information about how a certain feature should behave. Instead of performing the setup of the same task over and over again you can re-use a previously saved template to speed up your workflow.

Using WMA files

To be able to use WMA files (including adding files to your library and modifying their tags) in Helium Music Manager you need to have the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 installed.

Visualisation plug-ins

Visualization plug-ins generate animated imagery based on the music currently being played. The imagery is usually generated and rendered in real time and synchronized with the music as it is played.

Multi-User Support

Multi-User Support (Network Edition only)

Helium Music Manager 8 Network Edition supports multiple users. This enables each user of Helium Music Manager to have individual song ratings, favourites and playlists etc.

Impersonation