(2016-01-19, 15:18)DaveBlake Wrote: And I can keep telling users to sort out their tagging, but they find that hard and see it as Kodi's fault. It is made worse by the fact that Kodi does not handle some of the default tagging produced by Picard. Now I do not advocate we are tagging software specific, but equally from a user perspective they tag with Picard (as we often suggest), other players work fine but because Kodi is "musicbrainz id enabled" it messes up, then Kodi just looks silly.
Picard outputs as standard some artist tags like this "Artist1 feat. Artist2" with 2 mb ids or "Composer; Conductor, Orchestra, Soloist" with 4 mb ids (and variations on that). There are also v2.3 files with ARTISTS = artist1/artist2 (no space).
For one, it's not that I consider it "Kodi's fault." It's that it's hard, and that's it. It can also require huge changes to procedures we've created/learned over a long time. This is just one example: one of the things I do when I get new music that might contain duplicates is to load the new folder AND the existing "sorted" artist folder into picard. I then save /all/ of them, which creates some files ending in (1), and then I delete *(1).mp3 to kill the dupes. Yes, there are other ways to achieve that, but this one is a habit. It's also only an example. Some things that people (including myself) do are not so easily replaced.
So for you to tell me "change your tags" is easy, but DOING SO is not.
The only, one and only, reason I started using XBMC was that it was relatively universal. I could point it at a folder full of ANY media files and within an hour or so (I have a lot of media) it would all be presented in a uniform, user-friendly manner, regardless of filetype or origin. The current behavior is not universal. Picard provides a rather easy way to make sure files containing ID3 entries of "2pac," "Tupac", and "Tupac Shakur" get forced into the same place, but files tagged automatically with Picard, at least with its default settings, are unusable in Kodi.
This whole discussion seems to be about, "do we get the artist data from the MB tags, or the artist/albumartist tags?" and it seems to me that the entire feature that's currently forced on me is to read the MB data and "automatically" get the correct artist/albumartist data -- but here's the thing: if the file HAS musicbrainz tags, then the user (or somebody) MOST LIKELY ran it through Picard -- and that means at the ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags are *also* set by musicbrainz. There is no need for Kodi to redo what picard already did. The act of fetching the artist/albumartist data from the musicbrainz database has already been done.
And going back to that difficulty and user-friendliness thing: suppose a user, who does not have/use picard his/herself, gets ahold of some files with musicbrainz tags, and they are sorted improperly. Your answer is "fix your tags," which they do (or attempt to) by loading the files up in their favorite media player (winamp, itunes, heck Windows Media Player) and attempt to edit the data. Their changes are written to the standard ID3 tags. Kodi continues to ignore them. This user just wants their awesome new user-friendly media center program (Kodi) to do its job, but now the only way for that to happen is to go install and learn yet another not-as-friendly program. (picard, mp3tag, etc)
Are Kodi and MusicBrainz even connected as projects? Cooperating? If Kodi is going to ignore the industry standard ID3 tags in favor of data provided by another project/organization, what is in place to ensure there isn't a complete disaster if the musicbrainz people suddenly decide to change something? It seems to me that your assertion throughout all of this is "it's picard's fault" (you surely aren't blaming *ME* personally for running an automated program and expecting it to do what it professes to do...) so if we somehow managed to beat picard into submission, how do you ensure that a newer version of picard doesn't start "misbehaving" in a different way next week?
Your program is one I wish to use, for what it's always been good at: providing a user-friendly control interface for an otherwise-unwieldy media library. Being able to manage that library en masse is critical, and picard is the best tool available for that. The data you insist upon fetching from musicbrainz tags is already present in an industry-standard spot that is supported (and used) by literally every single other media-related program out there. I (and other users, apparently) simply want the option for Kodi to present the same data I see in the file everywhere else, and it seems the only reason I'm being denied this option is because somebody on the dev team thought forced MB integration would be a good idea and refuses to let go of that.
Adding a "feature" that isn't necessary and doesn't work, then forcing users to use it anyway... that sounds a lot like Microsoft.