[joethefox]

How many artists and albums do you have Joe? Genre > Album gives me pages of names without an artist level in the middle to split it down more. Likewise looking at artists without genre. I know it's not just me, but interesting to know if the need correlates to library size or content some way.

Proudly 1860 Albums with 2234 Artists collected in twenty and more years, when I started to backup my CDs were in wave format, flac didn't even exist... but that's another story
Going in topic, after Genre > Album I can sort by album name, artist name, decade of publication or number of plays, enough for me.

[DaveBlake]

About a) or b) Both are not incompatible.

For b) the main need is obviously created by 2 things :
1) NFOS, users can use nfo to set albums and artists genre that won't be used. (And of course online scrapping, but I doubt those who online scrape do care about all those genre things if they agree to have not controlled data).
2) Controlling data outside of tags.
As you know lot's of people like the Genre -> Artist view but needs to control their genre for artist without having to update thousands of TAGS.
The folder organisation Genre/Artist/Album is perfect for that, but can't be reproduced in Kodi.
Even if auto scrapping could not handle this special (but frequent) need, letting user manage the artists genre via nfos would allow them to have their library scanned in Kodi and offer them the navigation they want.


Anyway if there's only a) in Kodi, then genre for album and artist should be removed as they have in the end no purpose anywhere.

I agree a) and b) are not incompatible.

Thing is we need to do some careful labeling/naming to avoid confusion. In my view scraped artist and album genre as same as theme, style and mood. No more purpose, no less, so stay for same reasons.

In my experience editing NFO is worse than using tagging software. But I am not sure how changing an artist genre, without matching songs, is any help? I can display the data I loaded.... then what? I guess it is much like making an artist list by theme or style. Can do it, but IMO song genre remains the main navigation tool with power.

The folder organisation Genre/Artist/Album is perfect for that, but can't be reproduced in Kodi.

Path is now a playlist rule for both songs, albums and artists, so actually a user could make nodes or playlists that match their folder organisation. This is a new feature so worth mentioning.

I also think that it is great that Kodi uses song genre because an artist can have songs with many different genres. With folder an artist only has one genre (or maybe a genre hierarchy I guess).

But I guess for a user with poorly tagged music the use of song genre is just confusing. All they want is the music in their basic folder structure, whatever that is (may not be genre, could be different folders for recording quality). Not really want to have to scrape either..

[Tolriq]

But I guess for a user with poorly tagged music the use of song genre is just confusing. All they want is the music in their basic folder structure, whatever that is (may not be genre, could be different folders for recording quality). Not really want to have to scrape either..

Not necessarily bad tags but tags that do not correspond to his needs

But yes what they want is the display of their data as they want it, but still have the parsing of thumb and track numbers at least from tags.

They want the best of both world without having too much troubles.

There's tools for NFOs that are quite powerful for movies and I'm sure for music soon. Typically I do want control of my movies / shows genre so I do create all nfos for proper control (Well thanks Ember)
I do rely on internet data, for all plot, images, ... but I control the information I want without messing with my video files (Well there's no TAG for video right now but you have the idea).

I do have tons of artists and albums, now I use more Google Play Music since I love their smart playlist things. But before due to the lack of Genre -> Artist most of the time I ended up playing a whole genre in random or not.

[Torben]

I apologize in advance for my misplaced comment. Do ignore at will as I have zero insights into the Kodi world. Continue for an. Offtopic rant...

I see no reason for the genres not being the "key" in a database. They are unique already and readable by humans even.

Imho the biggest issue with genres Lies within the horrible metadata. I see little respect of using the proper genre. Wikipedia does a great job on genres and their place in music history. Sadly the taggers do not and use genres such as "oldies" - wtf.

*flies away*

[DaveBlake]

I see no reason for the genres not being the "key" in a database. They are unique already and readable by humans even.

Imho the biggest issue with genres Lies within the horrible metadata. I see little respect of using the proper genre. Wikipedia does a great job on genres and their place in music history. Sadly the taggers do not and use genres such as "oldies" - wtf.

Tagging software such as Mp3tag and Picard allow the user to set songs to whatever combination of genres they want. Want "oldies", set it to that. IMO genre is very subjective. I don't expect any external database to categorise music the way I want it. For example if you have lots of heavy metal you would want to spilt that into smaller sections, but if you only have one track in thousands that is "metal" you would be happy for that to be in "rock". Personally I just genre as custom tag to categorise my music, so I have genres unique to my views.

So I don't see the issue Torben, tag with the genre that you want.

[Tolriq]

This is another generation story

Ripping / tagging, vs downloading digital content (Either purchased or not, this is not the debate here). Lot's of people are not aware that there's TAG in their songs and such (This is why file mode will continue to be needed for music for a long time, until Kodi offers some easy TAG fixing solution, or something else to bypass this needs to still offer simple organisation of music)

[Torben]

So I don't see the issue Torben, tag with the genre that you want.

In my world genre is not really up for debate. Picasso does not become an impressionist just because you say so. Just as psychedelic rock was a movement in the 60s and 70s - only. That doesnt mean there arent a new wave of psychedelic rock. But the genre is now changed to reflect that.