[holydhaliwal]

I'm having trouble handling multiple artists tags in XBMC in certain situations. I know that you can use an artist tag separator defined in the advanced settings ( / ) by default. In situations where you have a collaborative album from multiple artists AND you have as well individual albums from EACH of those artists in your library you will have no problems.

For example, let's say you have this:

Music>PJ Harvey>Dry (1992)
Music>John Parish>Rosie (2000)
Music>PJ Harvey & John Parish>A Man and a Women Walk By(2009)

Then, Kodi will allow you to download Artist Information and Artwork for each of these entries no problem, provided the album artist tag for the compilation album is separated as such: "PJ Harvey / John Parish / PJ Harvey & John Parish". I like this setup because now the album will appear in the PJ Harvey entry, the John Parish entry as well as an entry for PJ Harvey & John Parish, AND it will allow me to assign a special fanart and thumbnail for the collaboration.

My problem, however, is in the following scenario. I have a Bach classical album "The Art of Fugue" for which I have separated the album artist tag as so "Tatiana Nikolayeva / Johann Sebastian Bach". This is so that I get an entry in Kodi for both the performer and composer, so that I can have all of the Bach performances show up under one entry in Kodi as well as have entries for the specific performers. The albums are organized as such:

Music>Tatiana Nikolayeva>The Art of Fugue (1992)
Music>Alfred Brendel>Plays Bach (1994)

BUT since there is no "Music>Johann Sebastian Bach" folder (it doesn't really make sense to have one) the entry for Johann Sebastian Bach in Kodi doesn't allow me to associate any specific artwork or download any artist information, and instead reverts to a default artwork and description from another (completely unrelated) artist in the library.

So I'm wondering if there is any way to manage the tags and folder structures so that I can have artist artwork and information even if an artist appears only in an albums tags and not in the music folder structure. Thanks!

[Piers]

I'd also like to know this, the reason I don't use Kodi for music is because it confuses me - Windows Media Player/iTunes/any other player with a library takes the tags and grabs whatever is needed which means things are in the order I expect and have organised. Kodi adds a very confusing structure.

[scott967]

Create a folder Johann Sebastian Bach and just put art in there, folder, fanart, extrafanart, etc. Go to the artist info dialog and browse for your art for both thumb and fanart.

scott s.
.

[holydhaliwal]

Thanks. This does work, sort of. Kodi seems to do this weird thing when you export your library into separate files, where it places a fanart, thumb and .nfo file, from a seemingly random artist, into the root folder of the music library. What this in turn does is replace all artists' artwork and info, who don't strictly have albums in the library, like in the Bach example from above, with the info and art which is placed in the root music folder.

Even if I make a Johann Sebastien Bach folder to "store" the art, and even if I place my own .nfo file in there, it seems that the artist is still only associated, by Kodi, with the root music folder.

In fact, if you have a nfo file in the root music folder from the last Kodi backup, refreshing the artist info will import the information from that .nfo file into the Artist entry in Kodi. I kept running into this problem with Bach until I realized what was going on, deleted the root music folder artwork and .nfo files and was finally able to retrieve artist information and artwork from the internet. Still though, this solution only lasts until the next export as again Kodi doesn't seem to associate a folder named "Johann Sebastian Bach" with the entry in Kodi unless there is an actual album in there.

[whitebelly]

Yeah, there is something odd about how KODI looks up and uses the parent folder two steps above the album folder. I had a different issue but seems like there may be some causal link in how the scanning/scraping is done.

[scott967]

Thanks. This does work, sort of. Kodi seems to do this weird thing when you export your library into separate files, where it places a fanart, thumb and .nfo file, from a seemingly random artist, into the root folder of the music library. What this in turn does is replace all artists' artwork and info, who don't strictly have albums in the library, like in the Bach example from above, with the info and art which is placed in the root music folder.

Even if I make a Johann Sebastien Bach folder to "store" the art, and even if I place my own .nfo file in there, it seems that the artist is still only associated, by Kodi, with the root music folder.

In fact, if you have a nfo file in the root music folder from the last Kodi backup, refreshing the artist info will import the information from that .nfo file into the Artist entry in Kodi. I kept running into this problem with Bach until I realized what was going on, deleted the root music folder artwork and .nfo files and was finally able to retrieve artist information and artwork from the internet. Still though, this solution only lasts until the next export as again Kodi doesn't seem to associate a folder named "Johann Sebastian Bach" with the entry in Kodi unless there is an actual album in there.

It should only read artist.nfo from the parent folder to one containing music file, but I have also seen export writing artist.nfo to the root folder, and another user had a problem where it was trying to read a folder "above" the root and getting errors. It's going to take some testing to understand exactly what is going on with this.

scott s.

[holydhaliwal]

Hmm strange. If we could stop Kodi from writting nfos and artwork to the root folder (not sure why it even does this, maybe just completely a bug) then that would partially solve the problem, for me at least. Well, artist such as Bach would have their info backed up during exports since Kodi doesn't seem to know where to store that info, but those are few and far between for me, so it wouldn't be such a hassle.

BTW, the reason I constantly export my library is because I keep all my media on my media center in the living room but still use Kodi on my laptop and desktop to play music over smb. So another thing I'm wondering if there is a way to get Kodi to automatically write .nfo files and save artwork as soon as that information are retrieved from the web? As I have Kodi set up on my other machines to only read information from .nfo files to avoid re-downloading the information from the web multiple times, this would save me the hassle of constantly exporting my library, and would probably be useful to others using this kind of setup.

[whitebelly]

A MySQL common music database might be something you want to consider. That way, only one client needs to scan and udpate.

[holydhaliwal]

A MySQL common music database might be something you want to consider. That way, only one client needs to scan and udpate.

Hey thanks this was actually a great suggestion. I was always aware of the MySQL databases for Kodi but never really checked them out in depth until you suggested this. I actually have three different machines now all running off of it and it works so well I'm amazed I lived without it before. This does solve a lot of my problems as now there's no need to constantly export the library. Thanks!

[beesmyer]

I've had this same problem, artists that exist in tags but not in folder structure. If info exists online then it will scan to database, but if not then no info is loaded. I would have to link data/thumb/fanart one by one. But I have a couple hundred artists like this. Not feasible. I like to keep all my nfo's/artwork local. I did create folders for all this artists locally but no scraper will load this information. I still would need to do it one by one. It seems like it should be easy to tell the scraper to load all local information for compilation artists only for example.

[beesmyer]

Just to add... I do contribute to online scraping sources. But there are still a few benefits for me to being able to scrape local data, one being that fanart.tv copyright policies make it very difficult to get anything approved for these artists.

[DaveBlake]

I've had this same problem, artists that exist in tags but not in folder structure. If info exists online then it will scan to database, but if not then no info is loaded. I would have to link data/thumb/fanart one by one. But I have a couple hundred artists like this. Not feasible. I like to keep all my nfo's/artwork local. I did create folders for all this artists locally but no scraper will load this information. I still would need to do it one by one. It seems like it should be easy to tell the scraper to load all local information for compilation artists only for example.

Can I suggest that you add this as a feature request in the Feature Request forum mentioning music scraper and NFO in the title, it is a lttle lost under the tagging title it has here. It isn't a tagging issue at all!

The desire to be able to grab (and store) images and biog data for mutiple artists from local sources all in one go is very reasonable. Sometime someone could be looking at improving music scraping, so worth making request easier to find.

[beesmyer]

I've had this same problem, artists that exist in tags but not in folder structure. If info exists online then it will scan to database, but if not then no info is loaded. I would have to link data/thumb/fanart one by one. But I have a couple hundred artists like this. Not feasible. I like to keep all my nfo's/artwork local. I did create folders for all this artists locally but no scraper will load this information. I still would need to do it one by one. It seems like it should be easy to tell the scraper to load all local information for compilation artists only for example.

Can I suggest that you add this as a feature request in the Feature Request forum mentioning music scraper and NFO in the title, it is a lttle lost under the tagging title it has here. It isn't a tagging issue at all!

The desire to be able to grab (and store) images and biog data for mutiple artists from local sources all in one go is very reasonable. Sometime someone could be looking at improving music scraping, so worth making request easier to find.

Thank you for the direction. I'll do that.