Kodi Community Forum

Hi!
I'm new to this forum and to Kodi in general and I'm still figuring out the right place for the issue I have - I hope I chose the right one

I'm trying to use Kodi as a headless music system most of the time and only connect it to my projector occasionally. I want to use Kore, the official iOS remote and the webinterface to control Kodi. This already works quite well, I only have one bigger issue right now:
I mainly add music to playlists by browsing the folders of my music collection. It is organised in multiple genre-folders, containing sub-folders for artists and albums or compilations. Most folders also contain a lot of single files that don't belong into a sub-folder.

The first thing I noticed when browsing my collection with one of the above mentioned remotes is the folder naming. A lot of them seem to get album names, even if they don't contain full albums.
One example:
I have a folder called 'Nina Simone', which contains several subfolders for albums, like '1965 - I Put A Spell On You'. The 'Nina Simone' folder also contains one single file called 'Nina Simone - Baltimore.mp3' (which is from the album 'Baltimore' and is tagged as such).

In the webinterface or Kore
'Nina Simone' is called 'Baltimore'
'1965 - I Put A Spell On You' is called 'I Put A Spell On You'
'Nina Simone - Baltimore.mp3' is called 'Baltimore'
The genre-folders (with usually lots of singe files and sub-folders) are called correctly.

Is there an option somewhere to only show the file and folder names as they are on disk? And is it possible to add whole folders to a playlist? This doesn't seem to possible either.
There is also a bug report for Kore from another user with the same problem: https://github.com/xbmc/Kore/issues/65
At first I thought this was a bug in Kore, too. I took me some time to realize that this seems to be a bug in Kodi itself.

I hope that somebody can help me with this.

Greetings
Zapp!

Edit: I forgot - I'm testing this with LibreELEC v7.90.009, Kodi v17.0-beta6

There are two ways to use Kodi:

1) File view mode: you can just navigate your folder structure. But when you play something Kodi will scan the tags and use that information to display during playback.

2) Create a music library (from the tag data). Then you can navigate the genre, artist albym structure derrived from the tags or make smartplaylists etc.

It sound s like you are doing 1) and I would recommend 2), but I can't be sure from what you describe.

Kore will work in a similar way, providing access to the file structure, or the library created by Kodi.

But to be honest I don't really understand what you are doing in order to be able to help you any more.

Hi Dave,

thanks for your answer!

Yes, I'm trying to do 1)

My problem is that even in file view mode, the real folder- or filenames get replaced by metadata.

I think it's somehow in the way Files.GetDirectory of the Api works, but my coding skills are limited, so my attempts to change that failed.

Happy Holidays!

Turn off tag reading in settings if you want a pure folder & filename view, location of this will be in Media settings -> Music

Hi jjd-uk,

this only seems to affect the Kodi GUI, not the file view mode of the remotes. However this would be the exact behavior I would like to see - just filenames, no tags.

Maybe there's a similar option for the data that's returned by the JSON-RPC API?

To illustrate the problem, I created this simple test folder:
Each file is from a Nina Simone album.
The file- and foldernames are displayed correctly in Kodi itself.

Here is how the folder gets displayed in the iOS-Remote file browser:


And in Chorus2:

AFAIK JSON API does pass out the filename and path data, but it is down to the app (Kore, iOS remote, Chorus etc.) what it displays. I think you need to ask them for support in the app specific forums. I am guessing their focus is primarily the library rather than a file view and they commonly take that approach, hence although it applies to various apps it is not a core Kodi issue.

Headless music servers should always use library mode in my opinion!