[black_eagle]

Hmm, yeah that makes a lot of sense actually.

Just checked and there are 4068 artists, but that's song artists, not album artists. I must admit I have never considered using Genre as a custom tag to effectively split the library but I'm certainly going to look into that.

Just as an aside, is there anywhere that documents what can be passed to the 'musicdb' virtual path ? I had to look in several threads at various posts to come up with my node query. I have seen several posts where, for instance, '/artists/' is followed by a number but I can't seem to find any comprehensive documentation on what everything is and what can actually be passed to the library.

[DaveBlake]

How many album artists? My genre approach isn't perfect either, can make the genre node huge so you end up making custom nodes for just the main ones.

Unfortunately the options in path/folder type custom nodes is undocumented. There are some examples in this thread http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=257378 which you have probably found. The basic paths are here http://kodi.wiki/view/Opening_Windows_and_Dialogs Then roughly the option parameters for muscdb are: genre, genreid, artist, artistid, album, albumid, role, roleid, year, compilation, albumartistsonly, only some apply in each content type. A look at how the option string is procesed in CMusicDatabase::GetFilter might make it clearer.

Some of it was intended for internal use only, hence lack of documents I guess, but it gives navigation behaviour that rule based nodes don't. For example the number after '/artists/' is an artist ID. When you click on the artists node entry Kodi internally creates a virtual path with the ID appended that tells the next node what to display. You can achieve the same effect using parameter artistid=N.

Code:

<path>musicdb://artists/?artistid=4</path>

Code:

<path>musicdb://artists/4/</path>

do the same.

All a bit vague I'm afriad, anything specific just ask and I'll see if I can help.

[steve1977]

Let me re-raise this again. Any chance we can limit the albums shown under an artist to the albumartist albums and not compilations? Maybe as an option?

[DaveBlake]

Let me re-raise this again. Any chance we can limit the albums shown under an artist to the albumartist albums and not compilations? Maybe as an option?

Yes there is a "chance".
You want the option to limit the albums shown under an artist to just those albums for whch they are an album artist and exclude those albums where they only on artist credits for song e.g. featured artist on track from album by someone else, or a compliation album from various artists.

I'm probably your best chance of it happening, it is on my "to think about" list, but I can''t promise when. Just not enough hours in the day.

[Powerhouse]

I agree with steve1977, and thanks for looking into DaveBlake. This would make adding compilation albums from various artists, a much better experience in Kodi.

[scott967]

I have a question, and that is does every one agree on what a "compilation" album really means? My personal method is to tag all album artist of what I call "compilation" as Various Artists. I don't really have (AFAIK) any "albums" which really are just a home-made collection of songs from different albums (eg "best songs of the xx's") where the Album Artist is retained from the original release. But I do have albums with an Album Artist credit to a group and there might be a couple songs with a group member credited as Artist. To me this doesn't seem like a "compilation"?

scott s.
.

[steve1977]

Let me re-raise this again. Any chance we can limit the albums shown under an artist to the albumartist albums and not compilations? Maybe as an option?

Yes there is a "chance".
You want the option to limit the albums shown under an artist to just those albums for whch they are an album artist and exclude those albums where they only on artist credits for song e.g. featured artist on track from album by someone else, or a compliation album from various artists.

I'm probably your best chance of it happening, it is on my "to think about" list, but I can''t promise when. Just not enough hours in the day.

Sounds great, thanks! Yes, that's exactly what I'd be looking for. Let me know if anything I can do to make it jump from "to think about" to "gonna happen" ;-)

I have a question, and that is does every one agree on what a "compilation" album really means? My personal method is to tag all album artist of what I call "compilation" as Various Artists. I don't really have (AFAIK) any "albums" which really are just a home-made collection of songs from different albums (eg "best songs of the xx's") where the Album Artist is retained from the original release. But I do have albums with an Album Artist credit to a group and there might be a couple songs with a group member credited as Artist. To me this doesn't seem like a "compilation"?

I used the term compilation loosely. For me, the issue is actually not only "various artist" albums or whatever you would call these albums. My "issue" is that currently all albums show up under an artist for albums, when even just one track is by the artist (or even this one is just feat. by this artist). This clutters the list when selecting an artist.

Thanks again DaveBlake for looking into this!

[scott967]

Let me re-raise this again. Any chance we can limit the albums shown under an artist to the albumartist albums and not compilations? Maybe as an option?

Yes there is a "chance".
You want the option to limit the albums shown under an artist to just those albums for whch they are an album artist and exclude those albums where they only on artist credits for song e.g. featured artist on track from album by someone else, or a compliation album from various artists.

I'm probably your best chance of it happening, it is on my "to think about" list, but I can''t promise when. Just not enough hours in the day.

Sounds great, thanks! Yes, that's exactly what I'd be looking for. Let me know if anything I can do to make it jump from "to think about" to "gonna happen" ;-)

I have a question, and that is does every one agree on what a "compilation" album really means? My personal method is to tag all album artist of what I call "compilation" as Various Artists. I don't really have (AFAIK) any "albums" which really are just a home-made collection of songs from different albums (eg "best songs of the xx's") where the Album Artist is retained from the original release. But I do have albums with an Album Artist credit to a group and there might be a couple songs with a group member credited as Artist. To me this doesn't seem like a "compilation"?

I used the term compilation loosely. For me, the issue is actually not only "various artist" albums or whatever you would call these albums. My "issue" is that currently all albums show up under an artist for albums, when even just one track is by the artist (or even this one is just feat. by this artist). This clutters the list when selecting an artist.

Thanks again DaveBlake for looking into this!

So is this the idea?

1. If music library setting is do not show compilation artists, only artists credited as "album artist" will be shown (including "feat" etc), and only releases (albums) for which the artist is credited as album artist.

2. If music library setting is show compilation artists, all artists credited as "song artist" (including "feat" etc) will be shown, and all releases (albums) for which the artist is credited as song artist on one or more one song.

scott s.
.

[steve1977]

I think so. Let me clarify a bit more what my understanding is (building on what you wrote):

1. If music library setting is do not show compilation artists, only artists credited as "album artist" will be shown (including "feat" etc), and only releases (albums) for which the artist is credited as album artist (including "feat" if "feat" is part of the albumartist). All songs of the album are shown (even if the albumartist is not the artist for every song of the albumartist album)

2. If music library setting is show compilation artists, all artists credited as "song artist" (including "feat" etc) will be shown, and all releases (albums) for which the artist is credited as song artist on one or more one song. When selecting the album, only the songs of this artist are shown

[DaveBlake]

Not quite guys, I don't think it good to re-use the current setting as the current behaviour should be kept as an option. This is my idea:

a) The badly named setting "Include artists who appear only on compilations" should be named after its function e.g. "Show album artists only".

[As an aside: Compilations include anthologies (all same song artists gathered from different releases) and also even if song arrtists do vary not all have album artist = "Various Artists" - check what Musicbrainz have to say about it. The rules for catching compliation albums may need a tweek, but that is not the discussion here. It would help clarity to stop using the term "compilation artist" when what we mean is "song artist".

Albums can have songs with additional artists that are not the album artist e.g. artist1 feat. artist2 on an album by artist1. These are not compilation albums, artist2 is just a song artist while artist1 is both song and album artist. ]

As currently, when the "show album artists only" is enabled only album artists are shown in the artists view, otherwise both album artists and song artists (those featured on some songs but not credited with an entire album) as listed.

Also note that the "show album artists only" setting can be locally overridden in custom nodes by using a "album artists only" flag. Hence expert users can create nodes that behave differently from the default.

b) Add a new flag for use in custom nodes - "whole albums only". When this is enabled the albums view for an artist shows only those albums for which they are the album artist. The albums on which they are only song artists e.g. they feature on a song on an album by some other artist, or it is an album with songs by many different artists, are not shown. When this is disabled the behaviour of album view is as currently.

The "whole albums only" flag only has meaning when "album artists only" is set. If the artist view is showing both song and album artists, then the album view for an artist must show all the albums that have songs by that artist. Otherwise we would have artists that show nothing.

c) Add a new setting "Show whole albums only" that applies the above by default to album nodes.

~~~

Sound right?

The naming of the setting, or even having a setting, will probably get debated in the team so may take a while. Change a) has been needed for over a year or more, so not expecting c) to be quick. But b) I can do without such a prolonged process, will do what you want, and I can give instructions on how to use it.

Naming this new "whole albums only" setting and flag I am open to suggestions. I was tempted by "artistalbumsonly" but it is a liitle to close. Another was the inverse "albumswithsongartist", yikes!

[steve1977]

Got it. Yes, this sounds right Hope that © is not a thing of the too long future. Once the work on (b) is done, it should coding-wise be easy? And if this is just another setting in the expert setting, I hope that this could get approve faster. I agree with you on (a), but ultimately I wouldn't try too hard if there is strong opposition among the developers (for whatever reason). It does not make any difference to the feature / setting itself.

I just posted another issue with albumartist view, which appears more fundamental?

[s3ta]

Not for confusion, but for the sake of usability (for me ;-) ) I'm asking for an option to get a different behaviour.
(I read the thread, but you aim to reduce the results found, I guess I want to increase the results)

My library is tagged via picard - so the "guestartists" are included in the tags and kodi reads and processes them.
Like described in the original post I navigate via Artist - album and kodi shows the album on which the "guestartist" participates, which is fine for me.
BUT I want to have a view (or maybe a shortcut) to the complete album - not only the songs the artists appears in.
(Same thing for compilations - if I stumble upon a compilation via some artist I still want to see all songs of that compilation - not only the songs of the artist via which I navigated to the album.)
e.g.

Ozzy appears on Lita Fords "Lita" only on Track 9 - but if I selected Ozzy in the artist view - I see "Lita" - when I open the album only "Close my Eyes Forever" appears.

I like to have a shortcut to open the complete Lita album - is that possible?

[DaveBlake]

S3ta I have been thinking about just such a feature.

I think there are occassions where the current "inheriting filter" approach is great, other times you want it tighter leaving out the stray tracks on compilations etc. as discussed above, but also there are times when you don't want the filter to be passed down. Then although a song based filter has been used to find the artist or album but you want to listen to more than just those songs.

Basically, like you ask, there are times when you want to go from a song to either the whole album, or maybe even to other tracks like it. My choice would be to have that on a context menu, but I'm not sure if it fits with the current UI design policy. I know that the iOS remote has the ability to switch to the album from a track of a playlist. Otherwise I guess it could be a button on the song info dialog?

Possible in library terms, but need some input from the UI guys to implement.

[s3ta]

Glad to hear you are considering this - a context item for the album and/or the song surely would do the trick.
Personally I wouldn't even mind losing the navigation path when using them.

(the "music" app on my sony xperia mobile has two context entry everywhere (artist/album/song) for jumping to the artist or album. Maybe I'm inspired by this, since I use them all the time and really like that kind of navigation)

[NewYears1978]

I just posted another topic before seeing this one.

God please yes allow when you click an Arist it ONLY SHOWS Albums from that artists, not other artists that the selected artist is featured on.

So annoying!