[rcrh]

I have a huge problem with the music database. Its splitting greatest hits albums into multiple albums based on the year of the song in the ID3 tag. I want the year to reflect the year of the song and note the year of the greatest hits release. Why is XBMC considering the song year in determining an ALBUM grouping? Are there many artists who release multiple albums with the exact same name? It seems like this is being over selective in defining an "album".

Or, do I have something entirely wrong?

[Brian B]

I think you have something wrong. Where are you putting the years for the songs vs. the year for the album? Either way it should be grouping the album by the Album Artist and Album Title. If these are the same then it should be listed under the same album. If they are not then XBMC will list them differently.

B.

PS. I would probably put the year for the song under the "year" metadata section and title the album "Greatest Hits (1984)" etc.

[rcrh]

I think you have something wrong. Where are you putting the years for the songs vs. the year for the album? Either way it should be grouping the album by the Album Artist and Album Title. If these are the same then it should be listed under the same album. If they are not then XBMC will list them differently.

B.

PS. I would probably put the year for the song under the "year" metadata section and title the album "Greatest Hits (1984)" etc.

I only see one "year" field and it is for the song. I don't see a year field for the album. I've double, triple, & quadruple checked that all of the songs have the exact same name & that the artist is the same. I've also tested by removing all of the year metadata and rescanning the database. When I do that the album is added properly.

That's what I know.

[Brian B]

So Artist = Album Artist and Album Title is identical for all the songs?

[rcrh]

So Artist = Album Artist and Album Title is identical for all the songs?

Yes sir. That is so.

[rcrh]

More on this:

I did some more poking around because I noticed two songs with the same year that were being split. Using a different tag editor I discovered a bunch of musicbrainz tags. When I cleared those out the album scanned perfectly.

It seems I owe XBMC a big apology (and perhaps a movie & a drink). I have no idea how these musicbrainz tags got in there but I'm now going through my collection and removing all of them.

[scott967]

If you do use the mbid, you need to make sure if you have an artist or album mbid in one song file, all song files from that artist or album need to have the same mbid assigned. Mbid can be helpful if the scrapers are getting the wrong (or none) results.

scott s.
.

[jmarshall]

And just to be absolutely clear: XBMC does not use the year to determine if an album is unique or not.

[juraj7]

I have the same issue. Just I don't see any different between songs. So what tag editor I have to use to repair it?
I have check it with MediaMonkey and everything looks OK. All players I've tried knows it's one album just KODI says it's two.

[whitebelly]

I have no idea how these musicbrainz tags got in there but I'm now going through my collection and removing all of them.

FWIW, an easy way I found to scan my collection for MBID tags is to open the musicdb file (or better yet a copy of it) with sqlitebrowser and view the album and artist tables. You can easily see which entries have MBID fields populated.

[PH-SYM]

I find that MusicBee is a great tool for searching (and removing) unwanted tags in bulk. Perhaps MP3tag would work as well. On a per-song (or per selection) basis they can also show the extended (raw) tags to find dubious tags that mess up things.