Kodi Community Forum

Hi, after many tries and thanks to the posts here I have managed to get my Music library in a decent shape. Originally I had used Jriver and sometimes in combination with MusicBrainz to tag and order my files, but after upgrading my USB interface to my DAC CuBox with OpenElec is performing at least as well as my Soundaware hardware streamer so i decided to migrate from Jriver/Streamer to KODI even for Music.

Had a lot of problems since my old tagging didn't conform to KODI standards but now most problems like MusicID showing instead of performers names etc is gone. I guess its the usual problems on various artists discs and such.

Anyway, I have a few issues left and since everything now is basically correct I'd like to ask for advice before i destroy it all.

I have 2 issues left:

1. KODI while scanning online is reading names of russin artists in Russian letter, Chinese artists in Chinese and Japanese artists in Japanese. Album titles and song titles seem unaffected.
   
   
2. I'd like to remove some artists from the list / for example I am interested in keeping solists, composers and conductors to be seen when i look at artist view, but In some cases it show orchestra, wich I mostly am not interested in.
   
   
3. Update artists pictures and info - right now I see a picture of the artists Robyn as default for any artist that are less known.
   

The way I was thinking of doing it is:

1. Export all library as separate .nfo to the album folders.
   
   
2. Use MediaElch to change the non-Latin alphabets into Latin.
   
   
3. Save in MediaElch, delete KODI Music database and rescan from local source and uncheck the button that prefer online sources.
   
   
4. If the above works, I use MediaElch again to update Artist pictures and info. Then Save the info and rescan from local source again.
   

Will this work? I realise that I didnt adress the issue of removinf orchestras, but then i need to remove both the orchestra nd the corresponding MusicBrainzID for the artist, right?

/Stefan

I'm going to start by suggesting you upgrade to v17 and use LibreElec, it would solve some of the tagging issues that you have been battling with, and offers better support for classical music - separating composer, conductor and orchestra. LE final is almost at release (for obvious reasons it is a lttle behind Kodi itself) but the beta is pretty stable, and it was created by many of the team that worked on OE. I have no idea if or when OE will be updated.

From what you say I would suggest a clean install rather than try to migrate from Jarvis, add the music source(s), scan etc.

It the change to Estuary, the new default skin, is too much you can install Confluence from the official repo (click "Get More...").

Your issues:

1) Set Picard to give you the Latin names when tagging (re-tagging previously identified items is quick). Ensure Kodi has "Prefer online info" disabled, as it sounds like you have the scrapers replacing the data derrived from tags, and that is not a good thing when the tags are correct. Just use the scraper to get the extra stuff.

While you are using Picard again, it would be good to add
in the Picard tagger script (found under Options>Options>Advanced>Scripting) to ensure you have an ALBUMARTIST tag, sadly Picard does not do this by default yet and is is useful when albums and multiple album artists

2) Rather than mess - removing both orchestra and their matching mbids from your tags - v17 has a way of listsing composers, conductors, orchestras etc. separately. You can also make custom nodes that show what you want.

3) Ah, the random art showing as default issue. A possible cause of this is that you have "Robyn" in a folder.jpg in a location Kodi is taking as the artist folder. But another thread is chasing a similar random image, so there seems to be some other cause I have not yet pinned down. On the other hand sometimes it just vanishes, so maybe a change to LE will resolve this. Otherwise come back and we will chase "Robyn".

If you have tagged using Picard (so have mbids), and have only got additional info from online (don't have NFO files yet), then I don't see why you need to export or use MediaElch. Just get the tagging right.

But to answer the thread title to empty the db and start again - remove the music source(s), then from settings chose "clean library".

To start well with a new library: Ensure that "Prefer online info" and "Fetch additional info on update" are disabled. Then add the source(s) again and say yes to scan. Check the library that your tagging has produced. If happy then from the artists and albums nodes click on "query info for all" and the scrapers will retrieve the art and additional info such as biogs and dates etc.

Thanks DavidBlake, I will start by installing LibreElec, I have no particular attachment to Openelec, more than it was faster than RaspBMC those years back when i made that switch. After that i just got lazy to try more.

New skin might be a good think, i never was fond of Confluence, I just used it because it was stable and it gave less trouble to use Confluence when Updates were made to KODI.

The tagger script I used before when retagging the problem albums, and it helped a lot. I also had set Picard to English, but obviously the scraper overrode that.
(see, I did actually read the forum before asking )

So , thanks for the reply and Ill report back after I reloaded the music into LibreElec (and hope i remember to back up the movie-TV database...

I still expect to have to update much artist info through MediaElch though. Its just too many albums for me to retag through Picard again in case they are missing the ID.

-Stefan

Love users that read up first
This is why I give full answers, hoping others will see it.

(2017-02-12, 11:24)Balcmeg Wrote: [ -> ]So , thanks for the reply and Ill report back after I reloaded the music into LibreElec (and hope i remember to back up the movie-TV database...

I still expect to have to update much artist info through MediaElch though. Its just too many albums for me to retag through Picard again in case they are missing the ID.

LE does have a nice update tool from OE. Take backups of db, always a good idea, but if you want to preserve the video db and not the music one, just empty the latter before you upgrade. I think a clean music db is a good place for you to start given that you have had the scraper mess names up.

v17 is far better at separating individual artists from tags values, and you can customise the settings to work better with how you have tagged. Any artist name separating text you like is supported, simply create the appropriate entries in advancesettings.xml
For example an extract from my advanced settings is as follows:
This replaces the default artist separator values, so all the artist separators you want to use must be included.
Perhaps you can use that to improve how Kodi understands your tagging?

By all means use MediaElch, just wanted you to be aware what Kodi could do.

Hi, LibreElec is now up and running!
At first I made a full BackUp with the Backup plugin and then installed a clean version of LibreElec on a new SD card (I learned form tragic experience not to be certain that an update work as planned)

Anyway, for some reason both the Installation application and the Full disc image failed to boot so i had to update through the update folder in my old OpenElec installation. Too lazy to make a disc image of the Old Sd first. Fortunately the install worked perfect and I only made a few changes in the settings before i Remounted the music network storage and now the library is updating.

I do understand why you told me I can change back to Confluence if I like. The difference in the skins are huge! I cant say I dislike the new skin though, Its just different and some parts I really like, like the default view for movies when i enter the alphabetic list. I been missing that in Confluence.
I will look deeper to see what settings and tweaks are available for this skin so i can slimline it further to my own needs - I think I will keep it!

Regarding your advanced settings - I assume the / separator is default in KODI and does not need to be added separately?

EDIT: DARN, I celebrated too early, the CuBox rebooted and now i get *no Signal* on my screen after the short CuBox boot text.

Ok. Fixed. Seems to be an issue with the libreElec 7.95.3 build for cubic-I. 7.95.2 seems to be running fine. I'll update the libraries after we finished this movie and see how things go.


Sent from my iPhone

Please feedback any LE testing experiences on your hardware to the LE forum, the guys will want to know. My experience with LE on RPi has been very stable since early beta.

Quote:Regarding your advanced settings - I assume the / separator is default in KODI and does not need to be added separately?

That is correct. " / " appies to everything including artist tag, but artists have some additional parsing to try and handle the "artist1 with artist2" situation. It has to be configuarable because someone is bound to have a band called "X with Y" someday, but it can take some of the retagging pain away or if say you have used ";" as a separator.

Enjoy the movie.

I already had the discussion on LE forum before reporting back here. Everything has its own place and time, right?
I'll get back here when I run the library updates (I lost my TV/movie library)


Sent from my iPhone

LE is looking pretty good now, retagging is more or less ok now, except that suddenly I have three different (soundtrack) entries.
Its easy to remove those and retag though, I don't have many in that category.

For some reason MediaElch refuses to scrape any artist info/pics online, I have no ide what happened.

Only issue left with LE is that 7.95.2 freeze and give me a black screen at the end of every movie/Tv series. Didn't try to play music yet since library is updating and I don't want to cause issues.

Just a comment re Musicbrainz. My experience in the past with MB and mainly Korean but also some Japanese artists is that MB was inconsistent with what was used as the "primary" name. And I found more than a few with both latin and native script names in the MB db with different MBIDs assigned. That seems to be less of a problem lately though. My work-around has been to use the "correct" (at least what I think it is) name as the artist tag with related artist MBID, and put both the correct and alias names as album artist tag and without album artist MBIDs. It works for me anyway. For example on album "Place to Be"
artist: 上原ひろみ
artist MBID: 8472f0ce-c57d-46f2-93db-d4a6f6e6473a
album artist: 上原ひろみ / Hiromi

The main downside of this is that "Hiromi" won't scrape and I manually copy all the scrape data from 上原ひろみ to Hiromi by doing a database single file export/ copy paste / import cycle.


scott s.
.

(2017-02-13, 12:16)scott967 Wrote: [ -> ]Just a comment re Musicbrainz. My experience in the past with MB and mainly Korean but also some Japanese artists is that MB was inconsistent with what was used as the "primary" name. And I found more than a few with both latin and native script names in the MB db with different MBIDs assigned. That seems to be less of a problem lately though. My work-around has been to use the "correct" (at least what I think it is) name as the artist tag with related artist MBID, and put both the correct and alias names as album artist tag and without album artist MBIDs. It works for me anyway. For example on album "Place to Be"
artist: 上原ひろみ
artist MBID: 8472f0ce-c57d-46f2-93db-d4a6f6e6473a
album artist: 上原ひろみ / Hiromi


scott s.
.

Thanks Scott, that is s good idea!


Sent from my iPhone