[Martijn]

1. Maybe change sort order as it correctly shows in my setup
2. Kodi doesn't touch your files and write data back into the files

[hansolo77]

Wow that was fast. I'll take a look at the sort order and see if there is something in there I can change.

That's good to hear about Kodi not making changes. I wasn't sure if that "prefer online" flag would change them or not.

[Martijn]

I know my albums have field disc 1 of 2 for example. Kodi uses that to sort them iirc.

[scott967]

I'm going through my music now that I'm on vacation in an attempt to resolve my issues. I'm going through my artists, one at a time. Properly tag with MusicBrainz then go back over it with MP3Tag (for some strange reason, MB doesn't save the genre..?). After everything looks like it should be correct, I then move them all to a temporary folder and add that folder into Kodi's Library. Check each album out, and if everything looks correct, I remove them from the library and move the files to a new permanent location. Now for the new issues:

1 - Multi-Disk albums. I'm up to the letter C and have my first multi-disk release. It has 4 disks. MusicBrainz correctly tagged it, identifying each track to each disk, and saved them out into a sub-folder for each disk.

You have to have Discnumber in your tags (Also Track set as 1/01 might work but I don't tag that way). If you sort by "track" it will sort discnumber/track. If you want to see the disc in the file list, in the music settings set your file list template with %S/%T. (or as desired).

2 - Read-Only. It looks like Kodi has some pretty power scrapers to go in and identify the various things about my music

It doesn't touch your files. It puts all the info in its music database only. WRT art, it stores the URL to remote art in the database. To display the art it downloads it and saves it in a thumbnail folder. In the song/alum info window you can "choose art" and switch between your local art and the remote (linked) art. For the "prefer online" that controls what is stored in the database for eg artist name. Again, no effect on your actual file tags.

3 - MusicBrainz. This is also related to #2. When I go through and get my music tagged and renamed, it saves the tag data for track numbers without zero padding. It's getting old having to go through and re-tag everything again to get those zero's in place. Is there a way to configure MB to include those? Also, MB doesn't seem to save the Genre tags in my music. I know their database has that information, because when I search for an album through the web, I can see the Genre just fine. Any ideas why it's not scraping and saving that information in my tags?

Can't help on Picard. I use MediaMonkey for managing the files and MP3tag to fine-tune tags (in particular I use APE tags in MP3 files and MP3tag copies the ID3 tags for me).

scott s.
.

[hansolo77]

Ok, my vacation is over now. Only got up to L. John Williams took a bit of work. lol

I checked my sorting method, and it was set to Filename by default I guess. Since all my files are "xx - yy.mp3" or "xx - zz - yy.mp3" (xx is track number, yy is song title, zz is artist) it would obviously display all the track 01's then all the 02's rather than each disc separately. I changed it to Track sorting, and that puts them all in order 1-15 then 1-16, etc. Thanks for helping me figure that out!

I'd still like some help figuring out why MusicBrainz tags everything without a Genre even though it has Genre fields in the website databases. The track numbering issue isn't nearly as important since it's a cosmetic thing for me alone.

I came across some more of the types of issues I was originally having. Where a single album will actually be listed multiple times when browsing the library via Artist. The big example I gave and can still confirm happens is "The Lion King Soundtrack". This was a joint work by Elton John and Hans Zimmer. I don't have a problem with that... the problem comes from when Kodi displays the album for both artists. If you look at the track listings from MusicBrainz (link) it shows the album artist as "Elton John & Hans Zimmer". Yet the track lists shows Elton John only did 3 songs (although he was the composer of most of them), Hans Zimmer did 4, and the rest are made up of other various artists. So, I would think a true album artist should be "Various Artists". Yet because MusicBrainz has identified them both, that's how it's been tagged. Now on the Kodi side of things, I think because it has an ampersand (&), it suddenly thinks this is 2 separate artists and lists them both individually. I think the solution to my problem would be if there was a way for Kodi to recognize this as a SINGLE artist rather than two.

Another example of this is with "The Labyrinth Soundtrack". (link)
Here we see "David Bowie / Trevor Jones" with a front slash (/) rather than the ampersand (&) however the same thing happens when sorting by artist. The album lists for both artists, rather than Kodi identifying this as a single combined artist.

Am I just being anal about this for no reason? Since all of my music is complete albums, I don't want to have to go through pages and pages of artists to find a specific one I want to listen to because they were jointly associated with the same album. I just want to see 1 artist, or have the album listed under a joint artist name rather than multiple times under different artists. I suspect this is either an overlooked setting somewhere in Kodi, or a feature not implemented I'd need to add to a request list somewhere. The other side of this issue is with getting extra album art like wall paper, and artist images. Where it works now, the combined artist schema would probably NOT work. So maybe this is one reason to leave it the way it is. I dunno.

[DaveBlake]

I'd still like some help figuring out why MusicBrainz tags everything without a Genre even though it has Genre fields in the website databases.

I guess because genre is so subjective and people want to categorise their music in varied ways e.g. if you have a few heavy metal albums then one genre is enough, if you have 1000 then you probably want to split them up more. There may be a way to get Picard to fetch them, I just don't know. Try their forum perhaps?

I came across some more of the types of issues I was originally having. Where a single album will actually be listed multiple times when browsing the library via Artist. The big example I gave and can still confirm happens is "The Lion King Soundtrack". This was a joint work by Elton John and Hans Zimmer. I don't have a problem with that... the problem comes from when Kodi displays the album for both artists. If you look at the track listings from MusicBrainz (link) it shows the album artist as "Elton John & Hans Zimmer". Yet the track lists shows Elton John only did 3 songs (although he was the composer of most of them), Hans Zimmer did 4, and the rest are made up of other various artists. So, I would think a true album artist should be "Various Artists". Yet because MusicBrainz has identified them both, that's how it's been tagged. Now on the Kodi side of things, I think because it has an ampersand (&), it suddenly thinks this is 2 separate artists and lists them both individually. I think the solution to my problem would be if there was a way for Kodi to recognize this as a SINGLE artist rather than two.

Kodi does nothing with "&", it appears in too many group names to be used as a separator. You have (via Picard) tagged the Lion King files as having 2 separate album artists - "Elton John" and "Hans Zimmer" - so that is what you see in Kodi. If you really, really want to have "Elton John & Hans Zimmer" as a single artist then you will need to tag the files differently and remove the musicbrainz IDs.

Another example of this is with "The Labyrinth Soundtrack". Here we see "David Bowie / Trevor Jones" with a front slash (/) rather than the ampersand (&) however the same thing happens when sorting by artist. The album lists for both artists, rather than Kodi identifying this as a single combined artist.

Again, it is the way it is tagged. How on earth to you think Kodi is going to know you want to see "David Bowie / Trevor Jones" as a single artist? I assume that you have MBids on this identifying separate artists, but even if not " / " is the default separator so Kodi would interpret that as separate artists.

Am I just being anal about this for no reason?

I had better not comment

Since all of my music is complete albums, I don't want to have to go through pages and pages of artists to find a specific one I want to listen to because they were jointly associated with the same album. I just want to see 1 artist, or have the album listed under a joint artist name rather than multiple times under different artists. I suspect this is either an overlooked setting somewhere in Kodi, or a feature not implemented I'd need to add to a request list somewhere. The other side of this issue is with getting extra album art like wall paper, and artist images. Where it works now, the combined artist schema would probably NOT work. So maybe this is one reason to leave it the way it is. I dunno.

Use search or genres or filtering to rather than go through pages etc.
But if you really want to have bespoke combined artists then tag your files to achive that. Of course finding art work etc. would be a problem as you say. Since what you want to do is both qwerky and can be achieved with tagging I don't see that is a feature to be added.

But to be honest I think it is a good feature that Kodi does identify separate artists in the library. It is one of the ways that having a digial library is superior to having CDs on a shelf. Live with it for a while, see if it is really so bad to have both Hans and EJ in your artist list.

Good luck with L onwards.

[hansolo77]

Thanks. I think I will just go with it for a while. My biggest concern at first was just sheer number of artists it suddenly provided when I knew I didn't even have that many albums. That prompted my other concern that maybe I did something wrong when I was either tagging them or had Kodi configured incorrectly.

[scott967]

Something to be aware of, I'm not sure if there is a change currently in Kodi Jarvis, but Kodi has some logic that determines if a group of song files belong to an album considered to be a "compilation". But in some cases that logic won't result in an album being a "compilation" that really should be. In that case, you can add a "compilation" tag set to true on the files making up that album and then Kodi will recognize that.

scott s.
.

[hansolo77]

So I did some more tagging today, and just finished up the M artists. I now have a prime example of the issue I'm having that I feel needs to be fixed by devs. In this example, I have the soundtrack to Brother Bear (link). Now, in this photo below, you can see exactly the issue I'm having. A picture shows the issue much better than trying to describe it.


(Full Size)

As you can see, there are 2 listings for the artists known as "Mark Mancina & Phil Collins". They are exactly the same, and each one has exactly the same album in it and nothing else. There is no reason for it to be listed twice. The only reason I can explain for this behavior is because Kodi believes they are 2 separate artists. But they should listed once for "Mark Mancina" (and it should SAY Mark Mancina) and one for "Phil Collins" (and it should SAY Phil Collins) if that is the case. Instead, I have to listings of the exact same artist. This is the issue that's troubling me.

[DaveBlake]

As you can see, there are 2 listings for the artists known as "Mark Mancina & Phil Collins". They are exactly the same, and each one has exactly the same album in it and nothing else. There is no reason for it to be listed twice. The only reason I can explain for this behavior is because Kodi believes they are 2 separate artists. But they should listed once for "Mark Mancina" (and it should SAY Mark Mancina) and one for "Phil Collins" (and it should SAY Phil Collins) if that is the case. Instead, I have to listings of the exact same artist. This is the issue that's troubling me.

This is the issue you started with (I think). It is down to your tags

Have a good look at the tags for all the files of this album. I am hoping that you have separate tracks rather than a cuesheet and one big file, I know more about that than I do cuesheets. I also assume that you have musicbrainz IDs in there. I am going to guess that you have 2 musicbrainz_albumartistID values, no ALBUMARTISTS (note the S) and ALBUMARTIST = "Mark Mancina & Phil Collins".

Am I right? Send me your tags if not, but it is a mis-match between number of artists in different tags that is the issue. Unfortuantely even Picard can get it wrong.

If I am right then how you correct this is up to you. One way is to add ALBUMARTISTS = "Mark Mancina / Phil Collins". The space-slash-space is important. Removing MBid is the other, but not as elegant and could cause other problems.

[hansolo77]

What program would I need to use to view/edit those fields? Mp3Tag doesn't really show that.

[DaveBlake]

What program would I need to use to view/edit those fields? Mp3Tag doesn't really show that.

mp3tag can show them, just customise what is displayed.

But you can also run that script again (look at earier posts) and post up the rtf files. I understand this tagging is being trying, and I will do my best to help you.

[hansolo77]

Heh I forgot you gave me that script. Here is the rtf of that Brother Bear example:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4gufy352wg26bp...e.rtf?dl=0

[DaveBlake]

Yeap, I was right

There is a mis-match in the number of musicbrainz_albumartistID and albumartist, this causes the duplicate artist listing. For example you currently have

Artist: Phil Collins
Artists: Phil Collins
MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID: 401c3991-b76b-499d-8082-9f2df958ef78
AlbumArtist: Mark Mancina & Phil Collins
AlbumArtists:
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID: 628abc89-3e26-4e2c-b33f-67544ccbb72c / 401c3991-b76b-499d-8082-9f2df958ef78

Kodi sees "Mark Mancina & Phil Collins" as a single album artist, but scans the " / " to see 2 musicbrainz IDs. The tags need fixing for all that album's tracks, and it is probably worth checking any other album with multiple albumartists for the same issue. Musicbrainz database isn't perfect, things like this can happen.

You have a choice of how you fix this. Either

a) Change ALBUMARTIST to "Mark Mancina / Phil Collins" - note the space-slash-space.
But this will give you "Mark Mancina" and "Phil Collins" as separate album artists, and displays "Mark Mancina / Phil Collins" when playing.

OR

b) Add ALBUMARTISTS tag (note the S) with value "Mark Mancina / Phil Collins"
This will also give you "Mark Mancina" and "Phil Collins" as separate album artists, but will display "Mark Mancina & Phil Collins" when playing.

OR

c) Edit both the ALBUMARTIST and MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID to both be one artist (assuming that you don't want both Phil and Mark in your album artist list). But having done this you must never scrape this in Isengard, or even look at the album info dialog, because the scraper will override the tag data and change the library. That bug is fixed in Jarvis, but even there if you enable tag override you will lose your changes. Messing with MBIDs is for grown-ups!

To be honest a) is the simplest, and then just live with having both Mark and Phil in your artist list (better than "Mark Mancina & Phil Collins" twice).

I will repeat: the number of items in the ALBUMARTIST and MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID tag need to match. You will then see as many artists as you have musicbrainz IDs.

[hansolo77]

Thanks! I'll give option A a try first and see how it looks.