[manfeed]

Hi, I'm trying to build my music library, but it's not an easy task, rather it seems a hurdles race...

I'm in Jarvis, I have an artist.nfo under every artist and I'm trying to build the muysic database in a computer with kodi fresh installed. The artist.nfo are as follows:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<artist>
    <name>Adele</name>
    <musicBrainzArtistID>cc2c9c3c-b7bc-4b8b-84d8-4fbd8779e493</musicBrainzArtistID>
    <genre>Pop/Rock</genre>
    <genre>International</genre>
    <style>Adult Alternative Pop/Rock</style>
    <mood>Wistful</mood>
    <mood>Yearning</mood>
    <yearsactive>2000s - 2010s</yearsactive>
    <born>May 5, 1988 in Tottenham, London, England</born>
    <formed>2006</formed>
    <biography>Adele Laurie Blue Adkins (Tottenham, 5 de mayo de 1988), conocida simplemente como Adele, es una cantautora brit├ínica de soul, blues y pop</biography>
    <died></died>
    <disbanded></disbanded>
    <path>D:\Mis documentos\Mi musica\Adele\</path>
    <album>
        <title>19</title>
        <year>2008</year>
    </album>
    <album>
        <title>21</title>
        <year>2011</year>
    </album>
</artist>

Then I build the database scraping with Local information only and almost all the fields get populated other than musicbrainz id...



Is that a bug o am I doing anything wrong?

Thanks.

[DaveBlake]

Sorry creating a music library is feeling like a hurdles race.

No Kodi does not load mbids from NFO files, but I am not so sure that is a bug. I don't think you are doing anything wrong either. But I am interested in what you have done.

The music library in fundamentally created by scanning tags from the music files themselves, and artist mbids are stored at that point. NFO files can then be used to add extra artist data that was not in the music files, e.g. bios and birth dates etc. Do your music files have mbid tags? If not then how did you create your NFO files and where did the mbids in them come from?

There are also limits on the NFO approach, it can not cope when albums have multiple artists, or with artists that do not have a unique common folder for all the songs they are on. I have discussed that is detail elsewhere.

[manfeed]

Ok, now I understand, thanks...

What I have done is something I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy... My music files tags don't have mbid, but I discovered that the addon cd art manager can scan your library and builds a database with your artists and their mbid, so I manually edit the kodi music database and "copy and paste" the mbid for every artist from that database. After that I exported the library to xml and then I got every artist with its artist.nfo. After that I went to another computer with the same music and imported those xml thinking that all the fields would be added... most are indeed but not the mbid, and now I know why... thanks again!

[DaveBlake]

Yikes! Now I understand the hurdles comment. Tag your music files maybe?

Could you not have copied the entire DB from one machine to another? Or was the paths to the music files different? Otherwise you could have worked on the SQLite database rather than all the copy'n'paste. Easier ways I'm sure!

But I commend the effort. I want to make it easier to avoid re-scraping artist and album data when moving/copying or upgrading a system, effectively what you have been trying to do (I think). I've also been discussing storing the mbids that the Universal Scraper fetches (if not found from the tags already) as part of scraping so that subsequent scraping and things like the cdart addon can make use of them. This means that it is likely in the future that it wil be possible to load mbids from NFO.

[jjd-uk]

Might be useful to make better use of nfo's with music. For me modifying tags is a complete no since you may use use your files in multiple setups, however if we could allow any modifications to be exported to nfo's and then imported again that would be of a help to ensure Kodi gets what it needs. For example I think there has been some disussion of persisting ratings when rebuilding the music database, so export and import via nfo could allow this.

[manfeed]

Might be useful to make better use of nfo's with music. For me modifying tags is a complete no since you may use use your files in multiple setups, however if we could allow any modifications to be exported to nfo's and then imported again that would be of a help to ensure Kodi gets what it needs. For example I think there has been some disussion of persisting ratings when rebuilding the music database, so export and import via nfo could allow this.

Yep, I agree... in fact as you can see in the image of the first post almost all the fields got populated with the nfo files; that database hasn't had any online update... In fact that was the reason I worked so hard; I thought it would be a matter of "work once-enjoy forever"

[DaveBlake]

Might be useful to make better use of nfo's with music.

I agree, although as a tag maniac I won't be using them much myself.

But the fundamental thing that much be fixed first is the restrictive relationship with folders and music file location. Not all artists have an obvious folder to put an artist.nfo into e.g. multiple artist albums (like classical) or disc sets etc. , and not all users want to splatter their physical music collection folder structure with nfo files. An option to put them where you want and identify by metadata content rather than location is essential.

For me modifying tags is a complete no since you may use use your files in multiple setups, however if we could allow any modifications to be exported to nfo's and then imported again that would be of a help to ensure Kodi gets what it needs. For example I think there has been some disussion of persisting ratings when rebuilding the music database, so export and import via nfo could allow this.

Of course using music files in a variety of players would not prevent me from adding the tags that Kodi now uses but the rest ignore before I create my music library. But I agree that it is best Kodi continues to leave the music files themselves unchanged. I know modifying tags is the only way that play count or ratings data data can be transfered to some other (older) players,but it does not seem a good route to go. As it is Kodi can never be accused of corrupting people's music files, and it is reassuring to those that hold their sources music dear.

[jjd-uk]

I'm tag obsessive as well, however for database fields that can be modified via the UI such as artwork and rating then we need an export option that doesn't touch tags, nfo's being the obvious choice in my view.

It does seem strange to me that manfeed can export an nfo but then all fields are not used to repopulate the database. To avoid such confusion the export should only include those fields that can be imported, unless perhaps that's already the way it should be and there's a bug preventing this.

[DaveBlake]

Yeap, I agree about using NFOs

Skipping mbids was deliberate, so not a bug per se. What we should be doing is using the mbid (if we already have one) to check the identity of the artist data being imported, and storing it if we don't. But we also need to know that the mbid came from a NFO (or scraper) and not a music file tag, so that we know if we can change it later depending on system settings. It is not just about adding the value to the list of those imported, and potentially benficial to have them exported.

I'm up for tackling this under the bug fixing beta phase of v17 if allowed. At the moment I have other new features that I would like to try to get done before the window closes.

Meanwhile online album and artist scraping is broken because of the state of the Musicbrainz main server and lack of schema change distribution preventing mirrors working, so it is difficult to test and work in this area anyway. But it does show why manfeed's desire to hold all the data locally is a good one.

[Mike_Doc]

To be honest i don't trust the export options for music in kodi. I've tried and tried with them and just ended up with complete corruption in some places when importing into another setup.

The worst issue seems to be with various artist albums, it seems to build nfo for the first artist on the release which us just wrong in my opinion.

Although i haven't used it for a while as i don't want my library messed up.

As we all know with music in kodi it is constant work to try and get it as good as pissible.manfeed, like dave said can't you just copy the dd file? Thats what i do nowadays to pass my library to different setups.

[manfeed]

I had almost forgotten why I started using nfo files... I tried Mediaelch (now is broken for music, at least for the ones that doesn't pay, I hope that in the future it will work again) and I found it to be very useful... it even searchs for the mbid and creates an artist.nfo file, but as things are right now there's no point for it, since those mbid will never find their way to the music library... Am I right?