[deveng24]

In my opinion kodi should only support picard tagging with musicbrainz id's, anything custom is just going to create other issues.

and i would agree IF MB was an official music industry Database and not a user collected Database.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Beginners_Guide

and what happens when the artist and/or album isnt in MB?

i myself have many local band cds that you wont find in MB. also, MBids for the most part are only used by kodi other players ignore MBids and the ones that do allow for editing mismatched tags.

this then gets back to the original problem of kodi creating multiple artist nodes and people like myself do not care to have multiple artists with the same album. now this can be solved if kodi actual let the user sort by the field they want and not by artist only.

again im not against using MB in some capacity but MB is not 100% accurate... and just becomes frustrating when you cant correct it.


BR,
Troy

[zag]

Yes sorry if I wasn't clear, I mean... if someone adds musicbrainz id's to their tags, they should use the official musicbrainz Picard software.

I didn't mean Musicbrainz tags should be mandatory

[deveng24]

Yes sorry if I wasn't clear, I mean... if someone adds musicbrainz id's to their tags, they should use the official musicbrainz Picard software.

I didn't mean Musicbrainz tags should be mandatory

yes ....but if i tag an artist/ album using MB Kodi seems to error on some of my artist because i have changed some id3 tags. This would not be an issue if MB was 100% correct. so at this point for people like myself using Kodi is to get initial tags... then delete all MBids, not a great option i think we both would agree.
like Dave and i have discussed some solution needs to be found for mismatched tags and how to deal with them.

as a side note I did not think people would add MBids manually and not use the official musicbrainz Picard software.
BR,
Troy

[DaveBlake]

Troy, great that you are happy to debate and sound things out without offense.

I use MBids as a good place to start when tagging items.

From all you have said, and since of your various players only Kodi uses the mbids, I don't think you mean that. I think what you mean is that you use Picard to do your initial tagging. That Picard added mbid tags is something you have generally ignored. For all the reasons you give you then edit the standard tags used by your players to achieve desired results.

BTW I think you can set up a Picard script to get it to create fewer tags, so you could save on any manual effort later deleting unwanted tags.

...and just because i dislike the implementation, i will work with it and modify what i need to get it to act how i want.... Kodi included..

Good. I don't think you need to delete all mbid tags, although since unused by most players and taking up space I am kind of surprized that you haven't already. But where they exist Kodi is going to try and use them to build the library. That is actually a good thing apart from those cases where you have changed the artist or album artist tags, either removing artists or replacing them with completely different ones.

I think what Zag is saying is that it is not up to Kodi to accomodate such editing, that kind of manual change it is up to the user to manage it consistently. All the tagging software that does a Musicbrainz lookup brings back artist, albumartist, album and mbid tags that match, it seems reasonable Kodi is designed to expect that.

My advice would be when you edit artist and album artist tags, either removing artists or replacing them with completely different ones (modifying the name but not the artist's identity is fine), that you also modify the mbid tags and any ARTISTS (note the s) or ALBUMARTISTS tags too. They are just tags and can be edited manually like all the others.

this then gets back to the original problem of kodi creating multiple artist nodes and people like myself do not care to have multiple artists with the same album.

That is your fundamental issue really, not Musicbrainz accuracy etc. And that in your files where you have removed album artists but left their mbids Kodi is stubbornly trying to show them.

I have no way to know how many people there are in that position. However it is still more likely that if Kodi encounters an apparent mismatch in number of artist names to number of mbids then it is because the names are being difficult to separate (ID3 v2.3 tags the mutiple artist names are a single string). It has no way to tell that the user has manually but incompletely edited the tags after they were retrieved all together from Musicbrainz.

Is it reasonable to expect that a user manually modifying their tags to avoid multiple album artists is also capable of managing all the related tags, as long as there are clear guidelines about what is involved and the impact?

now this can be solved if kodi actual let the user sort by the field they want and not by artist only.

So you could live with having all the multiple album artists in your Kodi library if you could also sort albums by what?
Is that really the issue? Or is it the length of the artist list?

Genuinely interested if not always agreeing

Although I do wonder for the sake of other test volunteers and feedback if I shoud split this off to an separate thread about mbid use in Kodi?

[deveng24]

Troy, great that you are happy to debate and sound things out without offense.

From all you have said, and since of your various players only Kodi uses the mbids, I don't think you mean that. I think what you mean is that you use Picard to do your initial tagging. That Picard added mbid tags is something you have generally ignored. For all the reasons you give you then edit the standard tags used by your players to achieve desired results.

BTW I think you can set up a Picard script to get it to create fewer tags, so you could save on any manual effort later deleting unwanted tags.

^ That is a good summation and accurate statement.

I think what Zag is saying is that it is not up to Kodi to accomodate such editing, that kind of manual change it is up to the user to manage it consistently. All the tagging software that does a Musicbrainz lookup brings back artist, albumartist, album and mbid tags that match, it seems reasonable Kodi is designed to expect that.

My advice would be when you edit artist and album artist tags, either removing artists or replacing them with completely different ones (modifying the name but not the artist's identity is fine), that you also modify the mbid tags and any ARTISTS (note the s) or ALBUMARTISTS tags too. They are just tags and can be edited manually like all the others.

this is were we differ, from a users stand point Mbid is not the standard for tagging files.... id3 is...for mp3s. And lets not forget that id3 tags with the last release has standardized the multiple artist. My findings so far show that most players do not correctly parse artist yet and under artists you end up with artist 1 (a+b) artist 2 (b+c) artist 3 (a+b+c) rather than artist 1 (a) artist 2 (b) artist 3 ©. if that was the case i would not have to pick a dominate artist and scrap the rest and could truly use artist and albumartist sort the way it should be. however, until other players start to correctly read the new tag standard. I have no other choice but to edit the tags so that i dont have a list of multiple combination of artist with one or two songs listed in their node.

That being said.... going forward i will probable keep the multiple artists... This however, dose not help the main issue of dealing with id3 tags and MB tags mismatch.

That is your fundamental issue really, not Musicbrainz accuracy etc. And that in your files where you have removed album artists but left their mbids Kodi is stubbornly trying to show them.

i think the issues are related.... because of MB is not accurate i have to edit the id3 tags (if MB tags an artist as AC-DC... and i need it to be AC\DC, i will edit the artist id3 tag and leave the MB). Let me be clear on my editing so that we are on the same page... i never remove the id3 tags from the list posted above but do modify them and do leave the MB tags (like kodi, I myself cant look at an MBid and decode it). This is where we would agree the problem stems from My tag editing and MB mismatch causing the multiple artist nodes having same name and same album under the multiple nodes.

just to be clear multiple artists with the same album if the artist is labeled correctly is fine (if you want to look at your collection by artist)... i think the problem above is the real issue and this is more of an UI issue for me (not a kodi problem) of not being able to sort by for example... artist sort album, which would eliminate multiple artists associated with the album and show a node for the release artist only.

to correct this in kodi... in would be to run a clean on your database and if you have stored all the fields to look for where there it has a MBid and no Album artist (i assume its a null) and delete that entire. but, Im not sure. Ive had 1 artist repeat with 3 nodes of the same name and another show a node with the MBid ( is how i knew to correct the problem by eliminating the MBids)

Is it reasonable to expect that a user manually modifying their tags to avoid multiple album artists is also capable of managing all the related tags, as long as there are clear guidelines about what is involved and the impact?

I think most people who take the time to edit/manage tags would use all the info provided by MB (if correct) and leave the artist tag alone. IF the other programs/devises they use correctly implemented tags correctly. However, i dont see ex..car manufacture doing this for a while..

Also, just because i choose to edit the id3 tags... most i would assume auto tag. Then depending on which organizer they use... Itunes, Musicbee, mediamonkey, j.media, etc.... and use the auto tag feature on each and/or plugins and pulling info from gracenote, dislogs, last fm, apple, google etc...... will change tags that wont match with MB.

So you could live with having all the multiple album artists in your Kodi library if you could also sort albums by what?
Is that really the issue? Or is it the length of the artist list?

yes, if i could sort by say albumartistsort..... If the library is accurate and i can sort by a tag field, i dont care how big the database for Kodi is and have multiple artist (if correct and accurate) listed under artists.

If you want to understand how crazy tagging gets.... search a digital dj site out and see how the use tags...

The length of the artist list for me is an issue.... my artist list becomes almost 2.5X larger when all multiple artists are used (jumps from ~750 to ~1700).

Genuinely interested if not always agreeing

that's how you create a better product....sometimes the best ideas come from understating how your end users are using you product and not focusing on only one way to skin that cat...

Although I do wonder for the sake of other test volunteers and feedback if I shoud split this off to an separate thread about mbid use in Kodi?

I would think another thread of under Requested features or a new (roadmap) would be an ideal for discussing MBids... and what people really need are frustrated about...gather some incite....

I know this is getting a little muddy (my wants and needs VS the true issues) but no one else seems to be posting issues or chiming in....

BR,
Troy

[scott967]

Acouple random thoughts:

The tagging issue re MBID is not an ID3 tag format issue (in general); it applies to all song file tag formats.

MBID should be able to coexist with non-MBID aware software

I think the main wrinkle the MB database added was the idea of the "artist credit" as a text string that is not required to be an artist. This I think is also designed to help with the problem of aliases. The idea being that all "artist credits" with a common artist MBID should resolve to a single artist in the database normalized to either tag data or online (depends on the "prefer online" switch state), and relationship data (with, feat, and) is also preserved in the credit.

I think the whole idea of adding MBID to Kodi was to improve online lookups of value-add artist and album data. The prior method of passing a UTF-8 encoded byte string failed to return a unique (or correct) result in many cases. Of course when MBID was added, it was necessary to add this into the Kodi database in a consistent fashion, and this impacted how the music library works exclusive of any online data lookups.

For my part, I did all my CD rips using EAC and encoded to FLAC with EAC metadata (tagging) facility (which also has implications for Kodi 17 new data fields of composer, band, and ensemble). I think EAC defaults to freedb as its source database but users can do some configuration of that.

scott s.
.

[DaveBlake]

OK Troy, split out but kept here in "music corner" because it does have more chance of others contributing than it would lost in the rest of the forums. Although to be honest I feel we are at an impasse.

I get all the reasons you have for deleteing multiple artists from the tags for a track. It is entirely your choice to do so, and others may do the same for similar reasons - other players can't handle multiple names. Of course Kodi can.

However if you have used Picard and added mbid tags as well as artist and album artist tags, then any editing you do needs to take that into account.

i think the issues are related.... because of MB is not accurate i have to edit the id3 tags (if MB tags an artist as AC-DC... and i need it to be AC\DC, i will edit the artist id3 tag and leave the MB). Let me be clear on my editing so that we are on the same page... i never remove the id3 tags from the list posted above but do modify them and do leave the MB tags (like kodi, I myself cant look at an MBid and decode it). This is where we would agree the problem stems from My tag editing and MB mismatch causing the multiple artist nodes having same name and same album under the multiple nodes.

If Picard sets artist tag to "AC/DC" and you need it to be "AC-DC" because some other players can't cope then that is not MB being "inaccuarte". And note changing that tag to read "AC\DC" is of no consequnce.

If Picard sets album artist (or artist) tag on a collaboration album to "artist1 / artist2 / artist3" (and provides 3 artist mbid tags), and you need it to just say "artist1" then that is not MB being "inaccuarte". But if subsequently removing the artist names you don't want you also need to be mindful of the mbids and delete the ones for artitst2, and artist3 as well.

You don't need to decode the mbid, although you can look up the artist from the mbid on their web site, just realise that the count of how many there are needs to match how many artist names there are. If you delete the last 2 of 3 names from the ALBUMARTIST tag then you need to delete the last 2 of 3 mbids from the Musicbrainz Albumartist Id tag. If you change "artist1 / artist2 / artist3" to be "Various Artists", then you need to change the mbid too - there is a unique value for "Various Artists".

Now if an album has mulitple artist mbid tags then I think it is correct that Kodi stores that, and consequently that album appears under multiple individual artist names in the artists node. That is not a mistake or inaccuracy! It is a reasonable assumption that if mbid tags are present then that is deliberate.

However you are also getting the same artist name appearing twice in the artists node. That will clearly be down to the mismatch in names and mbids in your tags, but I am intreagued what combination of tag values results in a duplicate. Kodi trys to repair mismatching, that is find names to go with the mbids, but it sounds like that is producing unexpected results.

So Troy, that artist that appears twice in the artists node, can you tell me how any files that have that name in the artist or album artist tag are tagged. In particular I would like to know the artist, albumartist, Musicbrainz Album Id and Musicbrainz AlbumArtist Id tag contents.

[deveng24]

Dave,
please dont misunderstand me... as Scott said " MBID should be able to coexist with non-MBID aware software" and id add vise versa...
and i dont mean to place all the blame on MB but, it seams that kodi chooses MB data over id3 tag data .... and yes, i can see kodi wanting all the info MB supplies and should be stored in the DB just not shown in the users library.

my reasoning for repeating this and maybe seems like a hard stance (not trying to be) is.... most users, not the ones who have used kodi since the beginning but new users looking for a media player are going to move to another program if their collections are not presented in a fashion they expect. Since the users are mostly going to be using a tag/organizer that deals with id3 tags and not MBids but may have a few MBids. this is evident with many posts that MBids and Tags are not playing well together in kodi.

im not sure why this is an issue... i would think while looping and artist and parsing the data a simple if id3 tag and MB present add node on second loop if id3 tag or MBid not present return. i know that was a simple example and code would be must more involved because album then song in album.

to me looking around all the posts it seems the solution for given for anyone with a tagging/node issue by the developers is use MBids... and that is fine if kodi is going to use MBids but if its causing problems its up to the developer to understand why not the user to correct it.

sarcasm below;
for example if a car manufacture said we are using boat anchors to stop and not brakes... and then users say i keep hitting cars ....and the replies from the manufacture is use a bigger anchor. while the user wants to use his brakes and cant understand why his brakes are no longer good enough when in all his other cars work just fine with brakes. but when you remove the anchor from the car and the brakes go back to working fine.... something is wrong with the use of the anchor and the way it was implemented

to sate again my issue is the mismatch between tags and kodi deciding MBids are what i want and not my id3 tags.... and yes in an ideal world people would edit MBids as they do id3 tags.... however, while many users my have found programs to add MBids (and if the match is close the will change it later in tags) most music library organizers do not and only modify id3 tags.


again... not knocking the developers or Kodi, i think it has great potential.... but if any program uses something other than what is used in the industry, it better work in conjunction with the standard. any discrepancies need to side with the standards.

BR,
Troy

oh, ive added some logs to to issue thread and listed some new prob