Kodi Community Forum

Musicbrainz as a database and Musicbrainz Picard as tagger has been emerging as the leading source for tagging our music. There are discussions underway how multiple artists should be treated. Given Kodi is among the leading player, I wanted to reach out via this thread to engage the Kodi developers to hear their thoughts.

Let me describe the issue first of current multiple-artist treatment:
* The "artist" (TPE1) in MP3 files currently with all taggers does not allow to logically differentiate between multiple artists. For example, there is no way for Kodi to differentiate whether two names in the "artist" tag is actually the name of one artist (e.g., a band called "Jam & Spoon") or two artists releasing a song together (e.g., "Chakuza & RAF Camora feat. Joshi Mizu")
* This leads to the issue that Kodi sees the "artist" tag as an own artist (e.g., "Chakuza & RAF Camora feat. Joshi Mizu" is seen as an own artist rather than 3 separate artists
* The same applies for albumartists, which is even more annoying

The developers of Musicbrainz / Picard have acknowleged the issue and are willing to implement an additional field to reflect this. Actually, this has already been implemented for artists and will probably be extended to albumartists.

How this works using my example of "Jam & Spoon" and "Chakuza & RAF Camora feat. Joshi Mizu":

"Artist" (tag) - "Chakuza & RAF Camora feat. Joshi Mizu"
"Artists" (tag) - "Chakuza / RAF Camora / Joshi Mizu"

"Artist" (tag) - "Jam & Spoon"
"Artists" (tag) - "Jam & Spoon"

So, it is now possible to differentiate what should be displayed when playing the song ("artist") tag and separately what should be used to categorize ("artists"). Same story for "albumartist" / "albumartists" tags.

Any thoughts of the Kodi developers whether this is a direction that Kodi would be open to implement? I believe this would be great progress in further improving the music library. Thanks in advance!!!

Thoughts?

This probably should be in the "feature suggestion" forum. I think we need a clearer statement of what the problem/requirement is. It seems to be several problems. First is known limitations of ID3 tags in dealing with multiple values for a tag. Second is how to treat the "feat." qualifier (and as an aside, this seems like it is anglo-centric. What about "avec" or even other scripts?) Third is how the "song artist" label should be stored or constructed.

The proposed solution seems to me to break everyone's library, unless they retag all their ID3-tagged files to Picard format. And as much as I would like to think everyone uses only Kodi for a music player, I don't think redefining well-known tags for Kodi that is incompatible with other players is a good idea. If there is a need for a special song-artist label, that should be a new tag that could be optional.

scott s.
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Thanks for your message. First of all, no worries, nothing will break as actually nothing changes for existing users. I agree that this is better in the "feature requests" section.

Let me elaborate a bit on the what the problem statement is:

Currently, Kodi reads the "artist" as well as the "albumartist" tag, which may or may not include multiple artists. For example, three artists record a song together and the artist of this song is called "Chakuza & RAF Camora feat. Joshi Mizu". This is the current treatment and may or may not be an issue for some. Some may actually not care and are fine that these three artists combined show up as one artist in the list.

Given I do not suggest to change the "artist" tag, the result will not change for anyone as Kodi should still read the "artist" tag and will continue to get this information.

There are some people who would like to differentiate more granular that there are actually three different artists who jointly recorded this song. I am suggesting Kodi to read the MBZ tag "artists", which includes the three artists (separated by a " / "). For those people that do not have this "tag", nothing changes. For the ones that have such a tag, Kodi would use "artist" to display the song artist, but use the "artists" information for sorting in the library.

The multi-language issue (feat. avec mit etc.) would not be an issue as Kodi would not need to be able to differentiate between this. Kodi will get the displayed name from the "artist" tag as it does today, which includes feat. avec or whatever else. The "artists" tag will provide multiple artists, but not the combining word between them.

Is this more clear? Can some moderator move this to the "feature request" section?