[Longtime Collector]

I suspect my naming conventions are getting in the way of a match with lyrics. In the ''big band'' era the early convention was to list the orchestra name followed by the vocalist (e.g., Carl Fenton Orchestra v- Billy Jones, Ernest Hare - Go 'long Mule). The vocalist usually didn't join in until half the song was completed. Later when vocalist were recognized as bigger sellers they were given top billing, with recognition to the orchestra / band leader (e.g., Frank Sinatra o- Axel Stordahl - Day By Day).

I want the orchestra and vocalist to appear separately in the artist listing. So I code ALBUMARTIST as orchestra / vocalist or vice versa. I currently format ARTIST as ''Orchestra v- Vocalist'' or vice versa. My filenames (for these cases) are "Orchestra v- Vocalist - Title".

Any advice on maximizing my chances of a match during the lyrics lookup for these two-part cases? Should I change the artist and/or the filename to just the vocalist and drop the orchestra name? I really would like to keep both bits of information somewhere in the file tags.

[scott967]

First, you probably get more useful help if you ask in the music section.

I don't use cu.lrc much, but taking a quick look at the code (I assume you want a scraper look-up of the lyrics, not embedded or existing text file) what I see is that the addon gets the title and artist of the song from the musicplayer (that is, the artist and title from the library).  There is an option to use the filename instead, and the addons options provide some pre-configured ways to name the file, with the default being artist - title.

So this of course needs the artist to be something that the scraper site is expecting; I have no idea what they use for popular music of the big-band era.

Now to some of your deeper question about song tagging.  The internal tags are the primary means Kodi uses to fill in library data.  You have several options for the song artist and album artist.  The simplest is just a single artist name.  Kodi is biased towards the conventions in the Musicbrainz database so you might look there to see how typical songs have their artist named.

But there are more feature-rich ways to tag your songs.  First, Kodi has predefined "roles" for things like composer, ensemble etc, so one approach is to add tags for these specific roles rather than trying the use the song artist tag.  Then, there is a more general "performer" tag which allows you to create arbitrary roles as a name - role pair (for example Frank Sinatra:vocalist).

Another option is to use an artist "credit" (which is displayed in the UI) along with an "artists" tag (note the final "s") to link to the artist name ("Frank Sinatra with Billy May and His Orchestra" is the credit, with that artists tag used to define two artists:  "Frank Sinatra" and "Billy May and His Orchestra"). 

You also have the option to define an artist sortname "Sinatra, Frank", though that isn't used for the lyrics lookup.

If you haven't, try turning on Kodi debug logging and also the debug option in the lyrics addon, then play a couple of songs and see if you get any insights from the log.

scott s.
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[Longtime Collector]

Thanks for the reply. Lots to chew on.

After tagging over 15K songs, I've given up on MusicBrainz. It especially does a poor job where there are multiple artists. Discogs (via Mp3Tag.de) gives a much richer selection of items from which to select. For example "Frank Sinatra, Axel Stordahl - Day By Day" gives nothing with the lookup function and strips out Axel Stordahl with the acoustic fingerprint search. And MusicBrainz almost never gives a reliable original year of release (which is by far the more interesting piece of information ... nothing like taking a trip down memory lane by listening to all the songs released when I was born, when I graduated, got married, etc.)

I'll look into the "roles" "credits" and error log approaches you mentioned and will report back.

[Longtime Collector]

I loaded up a couple of hundred songs with the 'big band' format and have concluded the best approach is to populate the artist (or artists) field with only the principle (1st named) artist. This gives the best return on a lyrics search. For example, Hilltoppers, Billy Vaughn - Marianne finds nothing, whereas Hilltoppers - Marianne does. See https://archive.org/details/78_marianne_...ia0054864b for an example of this principle artist concept.

Unfortunately this principle artist approach omits the 2nd artist from the database.

You can watch when using multiple artists in an ARTISTS field, that CULyrics combines them with an ampersand (artist1 & artist2) before performing the lyrics lookup, thereby missing many matches.

I was intrigued by scott967's suggestion of using "credit" to see the 2nd artist name during playback (UI) but never got it to work. I also tried using a ''contributors'' field to no avail. Any further insights on this approach would be appreciated.

If a lyric is found then I can see the combined artists name by using $INFO[Player.Filename] within script-cu-lrclyrics-main.xml ... unfortunately filename contains the extension (.mp3), so it's not as pretty as one might like (I'm still on Kodi 18).

A "fix" with CULyrics would be to use the ARTIST field when doing a lookup, so I can populate ARTISTS with both artists, and ARTIST with just the principle artist. But that's not how it works today.

[Longtime Collector]

Quick update.

I noticed CULyrics does not use AlbumArtist, which is a good place to store all the artists with separators. So Artist has the principal artist and albumartist has all the artists. I don't use album for any other purpose (I'm all singles), so I will use it for the 2nd artist. Then they will show up on the playback UI in the album field.

So I've found a workaround that takes care of us singles guys. (But I would still like to get rid of the .mp3 extension in my script-cu-lrclyrics-main.xml)

Enjoy.