[HeresJohnny]

Yes, it seems that the topic of sets pops up regularly. As far as I understand it, there is a wish for the ability to filter by boxset on one hand and on the other hand the wish to show the real album title which is part as a box set because currently only the set title is shown.

I guess for filterin purposes the user added tag "boxset" will be a reasonable way to go.

To show the "real" album title, a simple switch of "DISCSUBTITLE" and "ALBUM" as an advancedsetting would be great. To use Bowie's "5 Years" as an example, after the switch "Ziggy Stardust" would be shown as album title and "5 years" would either vanish or be shown as a subtitle to the album title as soon as that display feature could be implemented.

[black_eagle]

@HeresJohnny - what I have so far looks like this

Home screen



Clicking on 'Music' on the left lists the nodes.



Opening the boxsets node gives you this



or this, depending upon the view you select




Opening a set (in this case The Joshua Tree) gives you this - four discs with individual names



Lets move to the third disc, with the remixes on



Now lets open it and view the tracks




You can of course just click play on any of the discs instead of opening them and Kodi will play only the tracks on that disc or you can open the disc and play the track(s) you want that way. Not a big set I know, but it's more convenient to play an individual disc this way rather than have to navigate through a lot of tracks and queue up the right ones to make up the disc. Navigating this way is more akin to putting on just the CD/LP you want to listen to out of the set you bought.

[scott967]

That seems reasonable for a user drilling down through the boxsets.  The other use case seems to be showing these discs in an album view mixed with non-boxsets?

scott s.
.

[DaveBlake]

The other use case seems to be showing these discs in an album view mixed with non-boxsets?

A mixed view - album + album expanded into discs - is going to be tricky. I guess it could be thought of as a disc node, all albums separated into discs with many only having 1 disc.

What do you think @black_eagle the NODE_TYPE_BOXSET_DISCS renamed as NODE_TYPE_DISCS with all discs not just those of a boxed sets, and filtering by boxed set only possible of course
Something else to consider while doing the rest.

[black_eagle]

A mixed view - album + album expanded into discs - is going to be tricky. I guess it could be thought of as a disc node, all albums separated into discs with many only having 1 disc.

What do you think @black_eagle the NODE_TYPE_BOXSET_DISCS renamed as NODE_TYPE_DISCS with all discs not just those of a boxed sets, and filtering by boxed set only possible of course
Something else to consider while doing the rest. 

 I think that's tricky with the way I've written it at the moment. I can see why that might be wanted (twin or triple cd compilations etc) but if you wanted to do that, you would have to generate some sort of name for each disc as that's what the code currently uses to differentiate between discs. As long as you have idAlbum as well as strDiscSubtitle, then Kodi should be able to pull out an individual disc for anything. It would though, mean re-writing CMusicInfoScanner::CheckBoxSets so that any disc that doesn't have a subtitle is assigned one which might make the auto-assigning of bBoxedSet tricky. It might mean that you would have to use the boxset tag to assign an album to a boxset, rather than have Kodi do it automatically as a triple CD would have disc names and therefore fit the criteria for a boxset. I'd rather that that wasn't the case and I don't really think that users should be forced into adding the tag - auto-generating sets based upon the current criteria appeals to me.

Actually, if you want to split multi-cd's into their individual cd's then boxsets become irrelevant really, as they will get split up into their component discs anyway with actual names where they are in the tags and dummy names where they aren't. The only problem with this is that core code for the music db is not designed to support a three level structure. To make the boxsets right now, I have to get the actual album and then stack it 'x' amount of times, with a different label for each cd. It works, but it's not exactly clean.

TLDR; It's a great idea and one which Kodi could well do with, but it needs some thought as to how it's implemented, especially for single disc albums which should just show the tracks, rather than a single disc and then the tracks.

[HeresJohnny]

Not sure if that helps but the "Estuary Mod v2" skin has a 3-level structure to show Artist/Album/Song - maybe some code could be borrowed?

[DaveBlake]

No worries about lack of disc subtitle @black_eagle, they all have discnumber to use as an index. The boxset flag would also stay as it is - identifying special albums. Having a extra levels and a variable navigation around them is not limited by the db, it is a UI thing and that is the area of the design that needs attention.

Do we add another kind of content, "discs", or continue to treat them like a variation on "albums" - pros and cons skins wsie?
How to implement variable navigation? Currently this is fixed to several content hierarchical traversal patterns -
genres > artists > albums > songs 
artists > albums > songs
albums > songs
songs
years > albums > songs
sources > artists > albums > songs
roles > artists > albums > songs

with "*All" on second level (but not the top) to skip selection on that node type on moving to the lower one. Any given node type has a fixed child node type.

So far @black_eagle has in effect created boxed sets (albums) > discs (repeated albums per disc, or songs grouped by disc) > songs

I'm suggesting that we consider making albums > discs > songs generally available as an optional path, but do so in a way that also makes artists > discs,  years > discs etc. possible, or even other routes like sources > albums (already have a thread asking for that). That is change the current fixed node to child node relationship.

[black_eagle]

Regarding art, is there a need for multiple cover images for boxsets ?  Personally, I'm quite happy with the cover for the set but I appreciate that very often sets come with discs contained in their own sleeves so I was just wondering what other people thought ?

Disc art of course is another matter.  That does need to change with each disc.  I currently have a working version where the disc art follows a multi-disc set.   All I've done really is built upon Dave's earlier work when he added multiple different art types.  You need to add 'discart' and 'discartX' to advancedsettings under <albumextraart> in the same way that you add fanart to artistextraart.  If an album only has one disc OR is a boxset but each disc is in a separate directory, then you should use 'discart'.  If an album has multiple discs in the same directory then you should use 'discartX' where X is the number of the disc.

Skins for testing were AEON Nox: SiLVO & AEON Tajo. Any up to date skin that supports Player.Art(discart) for music should work fine.

~~EDIT 2~~

Some of this is so I can refer back later to what I did and also for Daves benefit before he sees the code.  Some is an explanation of how it works....

So, I looked at how the ThumbLoader works ( for those that don't know, thumb = Coverart).  There was some code in there already for sets where the set is split over multiple directories.  So, if you have a set <album name> with directories inside that (eg CD1/CD2/CD3/CD4 etc) Kodi could already handle different cover art for that provided that it is named 'folder.jpg' or 'cover.jpg'.

What I have done is expand upon that, so that albums where all the discs are in the same directory also can show different cover art.  To do this, you need to add 'coverX' to advancedsettings.xml (under albumextraart) in the same way you add discartX.  So for example, a 3 cd set you would add (this will do a 5 disc set)

xml:
<albumextraart>

    <arttype>back</arttype>

    <arttype>discart</arttype>

    <arttype>discart1</arttype>

    <arttype>discart2</arttype>

    <arttype>discart3</arttype>

    <arttype>discart4</arttype>

    <arttype>discart5</arttype>

    <arttype>cover1</arttype>

    <arttype>cover2</arttype>

    <arttype>cover3</arttype>

    <arttype>cover4</arttype>

    <arttype>cover5</arttype>

    <arttype>spine</arttype>

</albumextraart>

Then in the album directory (where the music files are) you would name the different covers cover1.jpg, cover2.jpg & cover3.jpg.  When playing a set, Kodi will automatically show the right cover for the currently playing disc.

If the album is already split into individual discs on your drive (<album name> containing [CD1/CD2/CD3 etc etc]) then you should just put cover.jpg in each CD directory.

NOTE that this does not show different cover art when initially selecting a boxset, only when either opening an individual disc, or playing one.   Consistent in Estuary and the other skins I mentioned above.

Ideally, I would like to display the individual covers (if there are any) for a multi-disc set when you first open it.  In other words, if there are three CD's I would like it to display cover1, cover3, cover3 whereas at the moment, I get the actual album cover repeated three times and only on opening one do I see the correct cover.  I've tried a couple of different ways to resolve this, but so far had no luck.  Not done yet though !!!

Ha, got that working.  If you have set custom covers, opening any album that is a multi-disc set (regardless of whether or not it's a boxset) will show the custom covers if you have set them.  If you haven't, it will just show the album cover repeated for the number of discs there are.  This works consistently in all views in Estuary.  I also tested with Aeon Tajo (works), Aeon Nox:SiLVO(Works in wall view only) and Transparency!(doesn't work).

Not too bothered about the skins where it doesn't work as the question is always 'Does it work in Estuary?'. And it does, so other skins will need to adjust.

Art is either assignable at file level (putting discart1,2,3 etc and cover1,2,3 in the directory with the files or through the GUI after your albums have been scraped (assuming you have set up your advancedsettings.xml) in the usual way and can be either local or remote art like the rest of the art in Kodi.

[black_eagle]

Some screenshots

















All screenshots are from stock Estuary except the last one which is from Aeon Tajo as Estuary doesn't show discart.

[dm21912]

looking good..

[BatterPudding]

Progress looks good.  Thank you all.  I'm someone who is hoping to see this in the main artist \ album view so I don't need to hunt out boxsets separately on the menu.

Early on I broke down the types of boxsets I have so it is good to see the separate art options for cover and disc.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...pid2874673
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...pid2875430

[black_eagle]

@BatterPudding As it stands at the moment, navigating by album or artist -> album will show album -> discs -> tracks if there is more than one disc.  This applies across the board to all albums, however there is a setting in the music library (Settings - > Media -> Music -> Library) 'Split albums into individual discs' where you can turn that behaviour on or off.  Default is on and enables disc navigation, off reverts to the navigation we have now. 

There is a boxset node that contains all the albums that meet the criteria we discussed earlier in this thread. ie, three or more discs with all discs having titles or having had the 'boxset' tag added to the album release type. It only shows those albums so its an easy way to get to your sets.

Regardless of how you navigate to them, a boxset will always display as discs followed by tracks even when you turn off that setting although all other albums will revert to not showing discs.  This does not apply (at the moment anyway) to navigating via 'recentlyaddedalbums' which builds its list in a completely different way and doesn't show discs at all, although for consistency throughout the GUI, I would like it to.

With disc navigation enabled, Kodi will display 'disc x' for any discs without titles (which will be most of them) but use any titles it found in the tags when there is one.  So my Elton John 3CD album displays as 'Disc 1, Disc 2, Bonus Disc' as only the last disc is named on MB.  The twin disc re-issue of Paranoid shows the two discs as 'Original Album (1970)' and 'Bonus Tracks'.

Thanks mainly to Dave the art works well and you can have individual covers for each disc in a set as well as individual discart.  The covers can also be different from the album cover.  If there aren't any individual covers then the main album cover is used for each disc.

[garfield]

@HeresJohnny - what I have so far looks like this

Clicking on 'Music' on the left lists the nodes.


 

Will boxsets selected through Albums be recognized as box-sets also?

And may I please ask for the complete manual howt to create Box-sets node? Or I have missed it somewhere in the previous posts?

[black_eagle]

Will boxsets selected through Albums be recognized as box-sets also?

If you mean, can you navigate them by album -> disc -> songs rather than (currently) album -> songs then yes.  This will be a selectable setting so you can turn it off and revert to how navigation is now, else you can leave it on and any albums that have 2 or more discs will show as album -> discs - > tracks.  Albums that are only one disc will go album -> tracks as there is no point showing a single disc if that album is just that disc.

may I please ask for the complete manual howt to create Box-sets node? Or I have missed it somewhere in the previous posts?

You don't need to.  Kodi will create the Box-sets node on it's own if at least one album fits the criteria for a box-set.  So, if you have at least one album that is 3 or more discs and each of those discs has a title (in your tags) then Kodi will automatically decide it's a boxed set and create the node accordingly.

If you want to force Kodi to make a boxed set out of an album (maybe you have a twin disc set that you think should be a boxed set, or MusicBrainz has not yet added any disc titles to your 16 disc set) then you can either -

• Use Picard (or similar tagging software) to add disc titles to each disc
  
• Add 'boxset' to the Musicbrainz_album_type tag.  Thats the one where it says 'album', compilation', 'single' or a combination of those.
  

Using either of those methods, or a combination of both, will allow Kodi to detect your boxed sets and create the required node automatically.  Note that even without that node and any boxed sets present in your collection, Kodi will still navigate to discs -> tracks if there is more than 1 disc in an album unless you turn that option off.  Even if you turn this option off, Kodi will still use disc navigation for any album that is marked as a boxset.  Obviously, you need to make sure that your tags are relatively up-to-date.  On upgrading, Kodi will prompt you that your tags need re-scanning (because it can read more tags than previously) and you should do so if you want it to auto identify boxed sets (or sets that you have added the 'boxset' tag to).

Currently, that's the way it works although this may change before it makes it into V19.  Although the detection and creation of sets is consistent and reliable it might turn out that it needs to be revisited at a later date so don't take this as gospel until there is a proper PR against Kodi's master branch.  Things are very much in a state of flux and both Dave and I are making changes daily.

[garfield]

Use Picard (or similar tagging software) to add disc titles to each disc

Please do not stuck to a song-per-file scheme. There could be dozens of reasons why one wants to keep his/her music collection by file+cue scheme. It is a very bad idea to ruine one's habbits. And, by the way, CD ripping/burning software like CUETools or EAC successfully read REM DISCSUBTITLE "" tag from the cuesheet. Maybe keep file+cue support as a foolproof method.
 

Add 'boxset' to the Musicbrainz_album_type tag. Thats the one where it says 'album', compilation', 'single'

Even this feature could be achieved with cuesheets by REMing non-standard tag. But if it is impossible to achieve with the KODI's then maybe you will allow to combine the tags from the cuesheet file with the tags from the single album file into the KODI's music database.

Kodi will still navigate to discs -> tracks if there is more than 1 disc in an album

Will it still show the discs' names or just Disc 1, Disc 2 and so on? Hope it will show their names.

By the way, there is a Singles node available by default in Music. Frankly when I saw this node for the first time I thought it could allow to separtate music albums from the music singles, but it collects the songs without the album title instead. Will it be possible to list music albums and music singles separately, keeping in mind that the music singles always have their own album title?