(2016-06-24, 22:22)scott967 Wrote: [ -> ]My tagging practice (and I have no idea if this is wide-spread with other folks' libraries) is to set TALB/album tag as a composer's "work", not a release such as "CD", which often contains several "works" mainly related by having the same performers.
So you would split a CD release of say Beethoven's 7th & 8th symphonies with 8 tracks into two separate albums of 4 tracks each inside Kodi? I kind of understand why, and hope to add a "work" facility to Kodi in the future that would make this unnecesary. But had not thought of this user work around, I wonder if any one else does this?
This splitting would make it impossible to scrape extra album data from online sources of course, then again there is not a lot of that about for classical music anyway. Do you duplicate the album artwork?
Quote:But currently there isn't a way to get this info for an "album" (as defined in the music db) except as far as "album artist" allows. So I have been tagging the "album artist" as <ensemble> - <conductor> for example. I don't see any way to provide the "role" info as part of the album info labels, either in the music library album views or musicinformation dialog for albums.
OK, the question about album conductor or orchestra holds regardless of your album splitting approach.
Yes it would be nice to pull the song conductor, orchestra etc. information up to the album level for display, but there is nothing to do that yet.
Let's talk about it. At one point I did consider giving albums an artist-role data structure too, but was disuaded by another team member and it is largely data duplication. Is the album conductor(s) the union of all the song conductors or the intersection (common value)? Either would have same result in your case of course. Or is it an album artist that is also the conductor of a song?
Also there is no practical way of separating classical music from the rest, although I guess you could use the presence of a conductor but what about Baroque string quartets etc.. But really whatever requirements there are for classical music probably has an equivalent with other genres e.g. mixer for dance music (?)
Historically some people have tagged classical music with just the composer as the album artist to avoid the artist node jumble of composers, conductors and orchestras, after all it is mainly composer that is used for classical music selection. But this means the album infomation dialog show almost nothing. Others have a album artist tags of <Composer; Conductor, Orchestra, Soloist>, and the long credit vanishes off the side of the info dialog and is ugly on album and song node library lists. The question is can we cover both situations and make use of any role tags at song level?
I think we need to consider the possibility of showing these album roles on the albums node list separately from what is shown on the album info dialog. Showing all the common song contributors and their roles on the info dialog is not going to disturb anyone, even if they don't care about the producer etc. But with the album lists users are only going to want to see certain roles for certain kinds of music and not others. The obvious example is composer: I would want to see that for classical albums but it would be clutter for pop even though some pop albums will have a composer. Not sure how to separate that? One approach could be to only get role infomation for the album artists, e.g. they are the album artist and composer, conductor and producer.
If we want to do this on the albums node then when querying the album data we either have to also query all the songs too, or store derrived data for the album. The fundamental fixed field query all before display design does not lend itself to this. Querying all the data for an album and artist roles from all the songs for the info dialog is a simpler addition.
If you don't scrape then the album info dialog is currently a little feeble. I would suggest we change that to be a full summary of all the song data including artist roles.
Anyone else care to input?