How do I get Kodi as a music player to differentiate between "John Williams" the guitarist from "John Williams" the composer/conductor? I scanned tagged FLAC files from soundtrack and my spanish guitar albums, and let the scraper do its stuff, and now there is a single John Williams entry in Artists with data and fan art for the conductor. But I don't want images of the conductor when playing guitar music, more importantly I would like to be able to choose between them as artists.
I understand why things are as they are, but what can I do about it now? Do I change the artist and albumartists tags on the guitar FLAC file to say "John Williams (guitar)" and then reload? Will I ever be able to scrap info for that artist if I do? If I go to scrap artist information I get a long list of "John Williams" to choose from, all of which seem to be of the Boston Pops/film music variety once loaded.
Since I can't be the first user with duplicate artist names in their music collection, how does Kodi, or Kodi users, handle artists with the same name?
I don't think there is a Kodi solution atm. You may just have to tag the one as "John Williams - Guitarist" or similar, then custom load the thumb and fanart from the album info GUI. At least he won't show with the wrong image.
or, and I've never tried this,
Maybe use the musicbrainz MBID numbers for artist , you might enter that artist mbid tag and scrape with the 'override with online information' setting on... then scrape that album folder.
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/8b8a38a9-...4466e8d791
Yes musicbrainz Id is the answer, but you need to be consistent -- don't have some instances of the same artist with mbid and some without -- they get created as separate in the library. You also have settings option to have Kodi use the "offficial" musicbrainz artist name spelling in the library.
scott s.
.
Many thanks all. Sorry to be thick but how do I get the Musicbrainz artist Id into the library?
I ripped my CDs to FLAC using EAC and edited any tag mishaps with Mp3tag, happy with that process. Do I have to use Picard instead? Can I just edit the SQLite music database? What is the mbid for John Williams, is it shown on the web page? Can I manually add tags to the FLAC files? Or is there some other way?
The MBID is found in the URL of the artist web page, so for the link I had above it would be;
8b8a38a9-a290-4560-84f6-3d4466e8d791
You need to edit/add the tags in the song files. I know you can add custom tags with MP3TAG, but not sure of the exact format or creation process, maybe someone can help.
I believe you use the following parameters;
field MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID
format/string %MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID%.
It may be as simple as field name = MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID, then enter value of 8b8a38a9-a290-4560-84f6-3d4466e8d791
You can hit "alt-T" in MP3Tag to display all custom tags of selected song(s)
Thanks Whitebelly, that's just the info I needed. I wasn't clear on what a mbid would look like but I can see my way forward now.
[Edit:] But having tried it I got some strange effects indeed.
All done on a test library thankfully on a separate profile, not my main music library. I am still mulling over the best way to deal with my classical albums in Kodi, and have a profile for just that experiment. Anyway here is what I did:
I added a MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID tag to the approriate FLAC files for the guitarist, but not the other Musicbrainz tags. Then I completely cleared the library by deleting the mymusic52.db and rescanned. It resulted in one JW artist and albums from both Johns.
Undetered I let the universal scraper loose to query info for all the artists. To my surprize a Micheal Bolton album (Mrs Blakes not mine) and the artist himself, appeared in the library too. These files are in a different folder from the one I scanned. Why this one album not the whole lot from that path? Artist John Williams vanished, and the one album that was by the conductor JW vanished. But not quite because I found the songs and could play them (shown with the wrong album title).
I have been poking about in the resulting MyMusic52.db. The Micheal Bolton album has deffinitely been scanned in with correct path, song, album and artist info. But what set the scanner off to snatch one album from my other profile music library. For songid order the tracks appear in the place of all but one track of the album I would expect to be there. I have that album but only one track then the Bolton ones get lsited instead. Odd? No sign of the mbid tag I added to the FLAC files as data.
Scrambled data for sure.
No worries, I am learning lots along the way. But adding just one tag does seem to have upset the scraper. I may experiment some more.
Thanks Scott. I have been running the earlier version 2.39 of Mp3tag but good to know. I'm using a 13 year old Win XP machine to do my ripping/tagging as it has the best CD drive - they don't make them like they used to! Unfortuately it can't go newer with mp3tag on XP (finally being deprecated), but I will consider moving machines if editing the tags becomes a big job.
My manual efforts with mbid has caused a bit of a data mess - see edited post. Teach me to meddle!
(2015-07-21, 20:26)scott967 Wrote: [ -> ]You might want to check out the mp3tag script, scrapes data from musicbrainz:
http://forums.mp3tag.de/index.php?showtopic=4175
Got mp3tag going on a win 7 machine so that I could try the musicbrianz scripts. Turns out it names the tag within FLAC files (Vorbis comments) differently from what Picard does and from what Kodi is expecting. Something for others to watch out for, but you can edit the script to tag with the follows:
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTIST
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID
MUSICBRAINZ_TRACKID
(not "MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID" etc., I also got this wrong when I tried manually!).
Hope that may help someone messing with their tags and not getting the results they expect.
Thanks, that may be useful for others. Is there the same issue with MP3 files?
Looking at the code here is what Kodi looks for
1. Recognized tag formats:
APE
ASF (Windows music)
MP4 (Apple iTunes music)
ID3v1
ID3v2
Xiph (FLAC/Ogg/Vorbis)
Generic (none of the above)
a. ASF
MusicBrainz/Artist Id
MusicBrainz/Album Id
MusicBrainz/Album Artist Id
MusicBrainz/Track Id
b. ID3v1
none
c. ID3v2
(TXXX frame)
MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ID
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID
(note an update makes this case insensitive)
(note I don't know why it doesn't read TRACK ID)
d. APE
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID
MUSICBRAINZ_TRACKID
e. Xiph
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID
MUSICBRAINZ_TRACKID
f. MP4
----:com.apple.iTunes:MusicBrainz Artist Id
----:com.apple.iTunes:MusicBrainz Album Artist Id
----:com.apple.iTunes:MusicBrainz Album Id
----:com.apple.iTunes:MusicBrainz Track Id
g. Generic tag
none
scott s.
.
Thanks. I never realized those fundamental differences existed.