2015-03-22, 08:01
(This post was last modified: 2015-03-22, 08:02 by bwaslo.)
Ok, I gave-in and spent most of a day and part of a night trying the "fix my tagging", all this to cut down on having annoying multiple names for artists, and hoping to get a few more artists images and album covers than I had. I followed what I understood to be the process shown on the musicbrainz/picard site (starting with the link given above). Clustering, scanning, etc, had Kodi/OpenELEC clean its library, and 'scrape' the hard disk files again, hours to do each time. Redid variations on the the process a number of times (probably stupdily), changing settings per what I found on forums and the picard help pages. Those were not very helpful, really, they seemed to often refer to UI arrangements other than what the current version actually installed and talked about things (that were often no longer there) to click on at musicbrainz (when I tried to go through there to get some missing album covers that I had images for to show up in my library).
What an uholy mess this has made of my library! I do now have the Beatles down to only two (from three) artists names, "Beatles" and "The Beatles", so I guess that's a small plus. But Vivaldi is now up to [b]nineteen[/b] artist listings now! I tried editing the tags to have "Antonio Vivaldi" listed as Artist and AlbumArtist, and "Vivaldi, Antonio" as the "artistsort" tag on all such album folders, it only seemed to get progressively worse. Now some albums I have no longer appear in the library selectors under the artists' names at all (none of them, when under dupe-listed artist's names!), though those album folders are still there on my hard disk, and if I look at the tags in picard (which I am getting sick of messing with, btw!) the album has the proper artist name in its tag. Mysteries.
I feel like an idiot not having backed up my library before getting into this (yes, I know.... but I thought "why not wait till I get the tags fixed before backing up"... dumb, dumb, dumb).
The sad thing is that I'm even a professional programmer (Win32) and engineer (signal processing), but I can't seem to get a good handle on the made-up jargon used in musicbrainz/picard, nor to have a certain understanding of what some of the actions actually do to the FLAC files (or is it: to some file in the Kodi library? -- what does what action to what data, where, anyway?).
Is there a solid description somewhere of what goes on so I can try to make my library into something other than the presently existing pages of cds, mostly without album cover art, (including some albums that I never had!?!); and artists with multiple names but usually without their images? The simplistic sounding "cluster" this, "scan" that, "save" whatever, "scrape" steps given are not giving me what I need. I really need what each step does/undoes in more than two unhelpful lines of jargony text.
What I really would like is to get back to the ultra-dumbed down process I used to use on my old music player. With that, I just used EAC to rip the disks to folders and to find and include album covers in the folders. I put album folders within another folder under the artis's' name, with a jpg picture of the artist if I had it. Then, the crude but usable player listed the albums (or folders of multiple albums), alphabetized by the artists names (as I gave them when I named the folders), and showed any images I included. That did all I needed -- except to allow me to play my audio library without needing a video screen attached, which is why I went to Kodi. I really have no interest nor use at all for having tracks tagged with artists' birthdays or dietary preferences nor reviews of the albums nor where the album release parties were held and who attended! Just the named FLAC tracks, with the associated album cover art (that I already had, thanks to EAC) and the artists names that I grouped them under, with photo. Is there any way to get back to that while still using Kodi/YATSE's videoscreenless remote operation? I want to listen to music, not play with libraries.
Either that or can someone tell me the steps I am missing (or shouldn't be doing) that is making such an gawdawful mess in my library selection?
(rant off..... thanks for your attention....., sorry about the angst)
Public service message: back up your folders, folks, before picarding!
