Kodi Community Forum

I've been a Kodi user for a while now and have over the last decade (and some) built up a rather large and quite messy music library. And I've had enough of it.

The library, in my naivety it has been managed formerly by Media Player and latterly by iTunes. From now on I intend to do the managing....

I have my weapon of choice for file renaming and tagging, I'm making a Music Vault where a backup of all the tracks will be cleaned and verified to make sure nothing is lost, this will then replace the current library.

If you're still with me, great, I appreciate it.

Her good self is an iTunes shut-in, the house sound system runs from Kodi - I like the interface.

So we have two systems pointing at the same media, this is ok, i've no problem with it really...yet.

So my question is really down to compatibility and best practice. the collection consists of artist only albums, singles, multi disc single artist albums, multi disc and single disc various artist albums, and some home recorded vinyl tracks.

So the plan really is to have a file structure along the lines of

Music> Artist> Album> Tracks (where these are all the single file tracks in that folder not a folder for tr1,2,3)
and the potential for naming convention of Album, album artist, track name, track number

But, where Artist is Various I dislike the way this folder gets really full! But i'll live with it.

What i'm interested in is how the ID3 tags will affect the way the library is viewed in both interfaces. I need it to be as neat as a physical CD collection can be if you had OCDC. (organised CD Collection )

I think what I want to know is, do i need to structure more like Artist>Album>Disc>Tracks ? or is the above acceptable and will the disc number only need to be in the tag not the file structure?

I think the issue stems from multiple tracks that feature on several compilations being file wise un-identifiable

Help!

Can someone offer advice or give examples please?

Thanks you in advance and well done if you got through that ramble!

The physical file structure has absolutely no meaning to Kodi. It is all based on the tags within the files themselves. So feel free to have any physical file layout you wish.

Now that is music to my ears!

pun intended.
Thank you for the reply.

I'm going to have to see what happens to iTunes when i've finished "messing" about with the library, she's so understanding you see....

The structue of artist/album would be best if you wanted the skin you use to be able to pull in graphics etc.

For the id3 tags, take a look at musicbrainz picard, kodi uses mb tags so this would improve kodi and don't think it would harm itunes. I have put my collection, around 4000+ cds, through mbp and it has done what it can, i have a lot of dj mix stuff and i guess it would be a bit ibscure so it isn't in mbp.

If you do try mbp, there can be a lot of manual work as you select a folder, say a well known artist to start with and the load it, then you click lookup and it checks mbp online, sone albums can have multiple versions so mbp may not be 100% on which album you have so you need to double check with lookup in browser and get the correct album, this can take some time so be warned if going with mbp.

On the kodi side theres lots more to do to improve how you view the music, but start with tagging first and one thing to consider is multi discs, i started out with multi folders i.e. disc 1 and 2 etc within the album folder, but found after once using mbp that it was better to have just to have the album folder with all the tracks and set mbp to rename.

Let me know if you have more questions, happy to help you figure thins out.

Mike.

top tip:
throw one album in -> select files -> cluster -> find.
Should give exact album match

Hi Martjin,

Yeah, 95% of the time i'd agree that that method works, but i know it's down to my music tastes not mbp that causes mismatches sometimes and have it down to a fine art now for putting my music through mbp, then mediaelch for arwork and hopefully nfos, then mp3tag to build/update nfos and then cdartmanager once in kodi.

For some reason i really cannot get on with MBP.
As you mention Mike_Doc it doesn't always get it right and needs the manal effort anyway.

For the multi disc stuff I have settled on the lowest possible file branch structure e.g Dave Pearce>Dance Anthem Classics>all tracks from all 3 discs

I have come to realise that iTunes really likes to make copy after copy of just some tracks in some albums, stupid thing.

I've been using Tagscanner to run through folders that have been bugging me Unknown Artist.....well i do have a lot of music a actually dislike for some reason but at least I'll be able to see it to avoid it!

3 hours last night and about 20 albums re structured and recovered.

MBP - there is something (probabaly user incompetence) that just doesn't sit right with me. I'll be using it to find the tracks with no tags or useable names at the end of the process, and then for embedding the art for all albums once they are neat and tidy!

Hi,

Yeah MBP can take some effort, especially with things like Dave Pearce albums, I have a lot of Renaissance & Global Underground albums and it did find some of them but not all and other DJ stuff from the '90s it failed on, but it's worth the effort. You could like at the media manager MediaElch, the designer built in a Music option and it can be helpfully on the well know stuff in you collection. Like I said at the moment I have various steps to getting everything as good as possible and still sometimes after all that all I can do is correctly tag in Mp3tag as the album is so obscure that nothing finds it!

(2015-08-27, 10:02)Mike_Doc Wrote: [ -> ]Hi,

Yeah MBP can take some effort, especially with things like Dave Pearce albums, I have a lot of Renaissance & Global Underground albums and it did find some of them but not all and other DJ stuff from the '90s it failed on, but it's worth the effort. You could like at the media manager MediaElch, the designer built in a Music option and it can be helpfully on the well know stuff in you collection. Like I said at the moment I have various steps to getting everything as good as possible and still sometimes after all that all I can do is correctly tag in Mp3tag as the album is so obscure that nothing finds it!

I think we have a like of much of the same music, which means you have already encountered the same problem I am facing now!

I'll look at MediaElch and have a read about it.

I have a number of mid '90s obscure Trance 6 CD coolections that were tagges up but the media manager i was using at the time has treated them all as single track singles....all split all over the place now. Such a mess, I might just re-rip them!

What 6CD albums exactly? might have done them myself and might have suggestions for you?

@Mike_Doc,

I have a similar workflow. MBP (to get MBIDs) -> Foobar2000 with the discogs tagger (discogs does a much better job of setting genres) -> Foobar2000 then moves the album directory to its final location as %album artist% - %album name%

MBP also has a plugin that will allow you to add an unknown album to the MB database, there are several steps once you start adding the album and it will take up to a week for the changes to get commited in the MB database. You can then run the album through MBP and it will pick up the MBIDs.

(2015-08-27, 14:03)Mike_Doc Wrote: [ -> ]What 6CD albums exactly? might have done them myself and might have suggestions for you?

They are mid 90's Trance type box sets of usually well know tracks and DJs by different names, such as instead of Tiesto you have Kamaya Painters. I am open to suggestions.
I have been running through the collection a few hours on evenings I can get time, so far about 10% done, this will take a while!

(2015-08-27, 16:32)khaoohs Wrote: [ -> ]@Mike_Doc,

I have a similar workflow. MBP (to get MBIDs) -> Foobar2000 with the discogs tagger (discogs does a much better job of setting genres) -> Foobar2000 then moves the album directory to its final location as %album artist% - %album name%

MBP also has a plugin that will allow you to add an unknown album to the MB database, there are several steps once you start adding the album and it will take up to a week for the changes to get commited in the MB database. You can then run the album through MBP and it will pick up the MBIDs.

My current process is trying to make the system as bullet proof as I can, well tagged and file names of a useful sort; %album artist% - %album name% - (%track%) %title%

So far so good. Yet to point anything at it so see what happens but I just have that itch to get it all tidy first and then check!

Quote:They are mid 90's Trance type box sets of usually well know tracks and DJs by different names, such as instead of Tiesto you have Kamaya Painters. I am open to suggestions. I have been running through the collection a few hours on evenings I can get time, so far about 10% done, this will take a while!

Not exactly sure what information you're trying to get into the tags. I use mp3tag as my preferred tagger, using the MusicBrainz or discogs tagging sources. In unusual cases like this I tend to go directly to the MusicBrainz website and search for one of the tracks. After a search for Kamaya Painters and selecting the option to show various artists release groups at the bottom takes you to the the list of all the compilations the artist is in. Usually I can find the one I'm looking for, unless it's a complete bootleg. I copy the exact title as it is shown on that page and go back to mp3tag and paste in the MusicBrainz search box to get the tags.

Thanks Paul, one of the main things is the embedded art is missing from many tracks, so that is a big plus for me, bugs me when it's not there!

The file names are a historic hangover, but most of the tags are actually missing from so many tracks. I really just wanted to hear some suggestions and pitfalls others have seen when doing this in depth cleaning.
I like to have as much info in the tags filled in as possible, granted much of it will likely still be missing for the obscure, but i'm trying to build some sort of uniformity into much of the library so i can navigate to "problem" files easily if i need to (explorer or tagging software of choice) and be able to know the track I was listening to is simple to find.

Discogs is the resource of choice for me at present, I just don't trust MBP, more likely to be down to not being able to listen to the track in situ and double confirm that track 002019991 in unknown by artist was actually what MPB thinks it was!

I use mp3tag. One option is to use mp3tag to copy all ID3v2 tags into APE2 tags. You can then edit the APE2 tags and in Kodi advancedsettings.xml file tell Kodi to prefer ape tags. That way you can set up the APE tags for best use in Kodi, without having an effect on most other music players that only read the ID3 tags. MP3tag has scripts that can pull in Musicbrainz data and if you code at all you can create your own to automate many things. The only thing I haven't been able to do is figure out a way to create all album.nfo and artist.nfo files in one go-around.

APE2 also has some advantages where there are multiple entries for data fields.

scott s.
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