Kodi Community Forum

Hi,

Does anyone know the various rules for how ID3 tags affect how music appears in the music library?

I really like that Kodi distinguishes Compilations and Singles from other Albums, because this is exactly how I organise my directory structure, but I can't get it to work exactly as I want. Can anyone help with the following:

1. If an album appears under Compilations, can I stop it appearing under Albums too? All complication albums appear in both places.
2. Does anyone know the rule for identifying a complication album? I'd like it just to show albums as complications if the Album Artist is Various Artists, but it's also showing normal albums there where not all of the tracks have exactly the same artist name (i.e. where someone else featured on a track). So I think the rule is either if any track has Artist <> Album Artist, or Artist <> Artist between all tracks on the album then it's shown as a compilation. I can't find any documentation on this though.
3. Is it possible to get a song to appear in Singles (and not in Albums) without removing the Album tag? I have lots of MP3s where I just downloaded one or two tracks from an Album, and it's annoying that these appear in the albums because when you browse to the album it just has one song in it. But I'd rather not have to delete the album tag, because the track does belong to that album. If that makes sense!

It would be great if Singles and Compilations could be identified based on the file location - i.e. the folder they are in.

Thanks,
Michael

The documentation is at Adding_music_to_the_library (wiki)

Not 100% sure on the answers, however:

1. & 3. I don't this is possible with the default library nodes, however in the new Isengard version being readied for release it's possible to modify the music nodes to a custom layout with whatever rules you want, some preliminary details at Audio_nodes (wiki)

2. For your individual tracks in an compilation the Artist tag should be used then Various Artists is the Album Artist. For other albums which have tracks containing featured artists again the Artist tag should be used for these, then the Album Artist is set to the primary artist for the album so it should be the same for all tracks.

2. I don't believe it's comparing any of the artist tags, it determines compilations by looking at the compilation=1 tag. If you remove this tag from your music files, they won't show up in the compilations section.

Thanks for the replies.

braz - I didn't notice the Compilations tag! That was causing the unexpected albums to show as compilations.

jjd-uk - I don't know how I managed to miss that wiki page when I was searching - it's very useful. And it sounds like the Audio nodes feature is exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks for the information.

For Audio Nodes you can do anything you can do with a Smartplaylist, but with the advantage that nodes give is that you can create your own custom hierarchy, so you can create a new parent node with sub-nodes underneath.

I've been playing around with smart playlists to try to achieve what I want, but I can't get it working.

I can create my own smart playlist for singles, based on the path of the file. This works great, so I don't have to remove the Album tag to identify my singles.

But now I want to create an Albums smart playlist that doesn't include the singles. I can't see how to do this, it's not possible to filter on path when the type is album. I tried adding a rule which says playlist <> singles and virtual path <> singles, but this didn't work.

OK perhaps not as easy as I first thought.

The only easy solution I see is to set Genre on all the tracks in your Singles folder to something like Single and then set up a Album Smartplaylist with rule Genre is not Single.

Thanks for the suggestion - using Genre tag is not ideal though.

Unless I'm misunderstanding how the smart playlists work, I'd say there is a bug. When the Type is set to Album, rules using Playlist or Virtual Path don't do anything. They should either work, or not be there.