[vicmanpergar]

Hello there

I'm tagging my music (ID3) with genres and styles (allmusic way). They have a couple of main genres (like Pop/Rock; R&B, etc...) that get tagged in the Grouping ID3 tag field, and some other styles (like Alternative Indie/Rock; Contemporary R&B, etc...) that get tagged into the Genre ID3 field. This way, Kodi recognize them all and show them in the Music Library.
Now my problem (and i don't know if this is possible), is when I go to the music collection (Artists, Albums, Genres, etc...) and click Genres, I get them all together, the ones in the grouping ID3 tag and the ones in the genre ID3 tag (this way: Pop/Rock, R&B, Alternative Indie/Rock, Contemporary R&B, etc....).
Is there anyway I can show only the Grouping ID3 tag field (the main more general ones) in the Genre node, and let's say the others (a lot more, and more specific) in a Style Node, or similar?.

Thanks for any enlightment!

[DaveBlake]

Unfortunately the Grouping tag is not (yet?) processed by Kodi. If you are seeing values in the genres node then that is because there are songs with that value in the genre tag.

While style can be loaded (via nfo or online scraped data) for artists and albums, there is no "style" ID3 tag for songs nor a value held in the music library. The nearest song value would be mood i.e. the is an ID3 tag for mood, and it is stored or each song in the music library.

I get what you want to do, in effect have a hierarchy of main genre e.g. Pop/Rock, R&B etc. and then have sub-genres Alternative Indie/Rock; Soft Rock, Contemporary R&B etc., rather than a single genres node with pages of entries. There is no standard way to achieve this at the moment, the default node is just genre.

My music library has files tagged with multiple genres like "Female / Folk" or "Classical / Symphony / Russian", or "Xmas / Choral", using the genre tag as a totally custom tag. It is probably not what other people do, and it makes for a very long genres node with entries for "Classical", "Choral", "Female", "Folk", "Russian", "Symphony" etc. but I do get the issue

One approach is to use custom nodes. The downside is that, unlike the default node, you will have to create each "main genre" node or sub-genre combination explicitly. So I have a node for "Classical", another for "Folk" etc. and build my own menu of main genre.

With hindsight I could have put some of the custom values I have in the genre tag into mood (because Kodi processes it), and then built custom nodes around that I guess, but not sure that seems right to abuse 2 tags with my custom values!! Also I am using song file tags to enter properties of the artist e.g. female, rather than mess with nfo, because it is easier for me to manage tags than nfo files. I am not suggesting you (or anyone) do what I have done.

Now Vicmanpergar you have used the Grouping/TIT1 tag. The ID3 standard describes this as

TIT1
The 'Content group description' frame is used if the sound belongs to a larger category of sounds/music. For example, classical music is often sorted in different musical sections (e.g. "Piano Concerto", "Weather - Hurricane").

So strictly it should be (TCON)Genre = "Pop/Rock" or "Classical" and (TIT1)Grouping = "Alternative Indie/Rock" or "Symphony". But at the moment anything in (TIT1) isn't used by Kodi, although it is on my list to add one day.


Anyone else have suggestions for using tags (or anything else) for easy division into categories browsing of a large music collection?

[vicmanpergar]

That's a nice explanation. I started from scratch to tag my music (not all fields) but I do confirm I'm using Grouping for the main, and genre for the others (it seems oposite to what i should have done), cause I did a search and found out ppl doing it that way.
I do confirm Kodi is getting all the genres from those two fields (all together), cause I have been doing re-scanning's everytime I tagged a large groupd of files (usually once per day). But, now that you mention it, the fact that I see Styles in my library info (per album or artist) might be cause of nfo's. My idea when I'm done tagging, I'll delete all the nfos, delete the musicdb, and scan from scratch, and see what happens. Only after it will start to get nfos from a third program, probably Mediaelch, since I probalby won't dare to activate the online scrapers within kodi after doing all that work, lol.....

About the custom nodes.... I've been taking a look, and though it seems bit complex, mainly cause i'm not familiar probalby, and i don't find a lot of info, I will probably give it a go and do some experiments with it.

Thank u Dave!

[DaveBlake]

Yeap, those artist and album styles will be from nfo files, if they exist in the right place in your file hierarchy then Kodi is using them.

Kodi scrapers will not effect your tagging, even if "Prefer online information" is enabled it only changes what the library stores not the music file tags themselves. So if removing all those nfo files anyway you could have a try at scraping online. I would disable "Prefer online information" though (I don't need it to change what artists did an album etc.) . But Mediaelch is very popular from what I read.

I can only repeat that Kodi does not currently process the TIT1/Grouping tag, so what you have in there is not magically finding its way into the genres. Kodi is only getting genre values from the TCON/Genre tag. Set TIT1 to whatever you like, one day Kodi may process it but if it does it will apply the ID3 definition and treat it as subservient to genre.

If you set artist and album style using nfo or online scraping then you can created custom nodes and playlists based on combinations of both (song) genre (from tags) and style (from nfo).

Doing it all with genre....
Another approach to having many genre values (main and sub together) but in a manageable way is to name all the sub-genres in a consistent way e.g. Rock-Alternative Indie, Rock-Punk, Rock-Progressive, R&B-Funk, R&B-Contemporary etc. Then you can create a "Rock" custom node with rule "genre starting with 'Rock'" and so on.

It really depends how much music you have, how wide your tastes, how many entries on the genre (default or custom) node you find convenient.

[vicmanpergar]

Cheers Dave

Thanks a lot for all ur advices and extra info, it is all valuable. I'm still not sure about TIT1, but if u say so, I will have to believe it, u are the expert here, hahaha.... Anyway, i plan to do some test with only 2 or 3 folders.
All the things u told me are good info, and about the possible future of TIT1 being read by kodi, I wouldnt care if it is the way u say as oposite to how i did it (correct way being urs), i wouldn't mind to change both fields, would be fair enough (TIT1 swaping with genre field). I have a lot to check!
Thanks Dave


Edit: Did a quick test with 4 folders, no nfo's, tagged as I do, and confirmed by myself u're 100% correct. Artists level have no genres at all. Album level got the ones I had for styles showing up in Genre, and nothing at all in Style. It's refreshing to have things clear, hehehe

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