Kodi Community Forum

Don't understand why I'm getting an Everyone artist when importing music to the library. The albums artist tags are Various Artists and Everyone doesn't appear in any of the tags. Where is this coming from, and how do I get rid of this artist and reassign the album to Various Artists?

First question I would have is -- "are you using an English language variant as your GUI language?"  Reason is that I believe "various artists" gets translated for display.

scott s.
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I use English (US), but also tried just English and it still shows an Everyone artist. What's weird is that some of my compilations are in Everyone and some are in Various Artists. The tags are the same for all albums though, the album artist is Various Artist.

So where is Everyone coming from?

@DaveBlake Doing some more research...the albums that are in the Various Artists group are ones that cannot be found on musicbrainz. Any of the compilation albums that have a musicbrainz id are put in an Everyone artist. Is Kodi doing this, is it MusicBrainz, anyway to turn this off?

Thanks!

Hi @braz,

Can you provide the MusicBraniz link to one of these albums with the Everyone artist.

Also a debug log which captures the scan and scrape of the album would be useful also.

@DaveBlake is away for a few days, that is why he has been a bit quiet.

Thanks

Here's one...Various Artists - In From The Storm (1995)

https://musicbrainz.org/release/5d6dcc10...421c52176b

Here's the debug log, I just did a refresh on the above album, hope that's enough.

https://pastebin.com/Qxh1jyw5

What's weird is these albums are shown under an Everyone artist in the music library. But on the music info dialog for these albums, it shows them as Various Artists.

Thanks!

(2018-03-24, 05:36)braz Wrote: [ -> ]Doing some more research...the albums that are in the Various Artists group are ones that cannot be found on musicbrainz. Any of the compilation albums that have a musicbrainz id are put in an Everyone artist. Is Kodi doing this, is it MusicBrainz, anyway to turn this off?

That is a useful clue, and gives me some ideas what has happened at least.
It is not a mtatter of turning off something, but I would like to get to the cause and resolve it with you. I think it is a tagging issue.

During tag scanning Kodi gets mbid and artist names in pairs, and if there are mbid tags then they are taken as definative (not the artist name). The artist name given with an artist mbid just gets saved the first time it is added to the library, subsequent occurances of that artist mbid the artist name gets stored as a descriptive string for that particular song and album, but the name of the artist record stays as the first value given.

I think that one music file has or had an ALBUMARTIST tag of "Everyone" paired with the mbid for various artists 89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377. This is what has been captured by Kodi as the artist name for that mbid, and then the subsequent albums with that album artist mbid (even though music files are tagged with "various artists") appear under it on the artists node.

The snag is that unless that artist gets deleted, that means removing all music that by "various artists", just fixing the music file that cause it will not cause the "everyone" to be replaced. So you need to find that file (or filles?), correct the tagging, and then drop, lib clean and rescan that part of your music collection that has various artist compilations.

Start with finding the file(s), it could even be a Picard tagging issue (someone entered something odd at Musicbrainz). Or it could be that you changed/corrected  the tagging already, but Kodi is persisting with the first name it was given with mbid 89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377.

If you let me have your MyMusic70.db I might be able to locate the files that started this.

BTW from the log you are using a version of the skin helper service that is ourt of date with the current JSON API. No idea if there is an update yet to that addon, or even if your skin actually needs it, but it is running and failing GetAlbums calls.

Thanks @DaveBlake, that was just the tip I needed! Found the offending file, there was just one with the Everyone artist. I've always tagged with Picard, looks like it was corrected on MusicBrainz sometime after I originally tagged the files.

Now that the tag is fixed, is there an easy way to just drop the Everyone and Various Artists and rescan them? Or do I have to rescan my entire library? It would be nice if it was possible to manage music like videos and remove individual items through the context menu.

Or maybe I should export my music library to individual files and then drop the entire db? That way it will rescan faster? I'd of course delete all of the nfo's in the Various Artists folder to force them to start from scratch.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Edit: Nevermind, realizing now I can just move the Various Artists folder on my hd, clean the library, then add the folder back. Will try that now.

Hmm, tried renaming the Various Artists folder and doing a library clean. It took a while to clean, but the Everyone and Various Artists still show up in the my library, even after a restart. The files are rightfully missing in Kodi though, and can't be played. So I'm wondering why Kodi didn't remove them from the db when it did a clean?

(2018-03-24, 18:10)braz Wrote: [ -> ]Hmm, tried renaming the Various Artists folder and doing a library clean. It took a while to clean, but the Everyone and Various Artists still show up in the my library, even after a restart. The files are rightfully missing in Kodi though, and can't be played. So I'm wondering why Kodi didn't remove them from the db when it did a clean?

I am wondering too. That you can still see the albums/songs means that clean has not worked.  One possibility is that you accidently cleaned the video library not the music one. The way the menu screen  is layed out it is really easy to make this mistake (I have even done it myself). You need to scroll down the page to get to the music library clean.

So worth trying a clean again, and then checking the log file to see it was successful (or not). Kodi is designed to allow for media to be on removeable drives, hence the lack of access to music because of renaming does not cause the items to be removed. But lib clean from the system menu does remove them from the library.



Rather than drive yourself crazy over clean up, having found and fixed the file I would be tempted to just modify the music db directly editing the name of the record in the artist table

(2018-03-24, 20:13)DaveBlake Wrote: [ -> ]

(2018-03-24, 18:10)braz Wrote: [ -> ]Hmm, tried renaming the Various Artists folder and doing a library clean. It took a while to clean, but the Everyone and Various Artists still show up in the my library, even after a restart. The files are rightfully missing in Kodi though, and can't be played. So I'm wondering why Kodi didn't remove them from the db when it did a clean?

I am wondering too. That you can still see the albums/songs means that clean has not worked.  One possibility is that you accidently cleaned the video library not the music one. The way the menu screen  is layed out it is really easy to make this mistake (I have even done it myself). You need to scroll down the page to get to the music library clean.

So worth trying a clean again, and then checking the log file to see it was successful (or not). Kodi is designed to allow for media to be on removeable drives, hence the lack of access to music because of renaming does not cause the items to be removed. But lib clean from the system menu does remove them from the library.



Rather than drive yourself crazy over clean up, having found and fixed the file I would be tempted to just modify the music db directly editing the name of the record in the artist table 

I was definitely cleaning the music library, tried it several times and restarted Kodi, but Everyone and Various Artists stayed in the library even though there was no media at those locations. Ended up exporting my library to nfo files and then removing the music database, forcing it to rescan everything. It's almost done now, will know for sure in a bit.

My music is on a directly attached USB drive. No idea why the clean didn't work. Would it be possible to add a feature to remove individual artists/albums/songs using the context menu, similar to how it works for videos?

After fixing the tag and rescanning my entire music library, the issue with an Everyone artist is resolved, thanks @DaveBlake. This could happen to anyone else who has the 1993 Various Artists album Bob Dylan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration though.

You'll notice track 13 on the second disc shows the artist as Everyone on musicbrainz.org.

https://musicbrainz.org/release/94fb18c0...a442427a90

(2018-03-24, 05:36)braz Wrote: [ -> ]Any of the compilation albums that have a musicbrainz id are put in an Everyone artist.

 OK Here's my guess:  Since "Everyone" is showing up on MB-scraped albums, I suspect at one point you got the song tags from musicbrainz.  The artist id for "Various Artists" is 89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377 and when that is in the MB album artist ID tag, it will be used as the way to match an existing artist in the database (if you also have an album MBID in the tags for that song).  When "prefer online info" setting is off, the artist name string is whatever is in the artist entry in the database.  Maybe sometime in the past you had a bad tag that had "everyone" as the artist name string when you scanned and Kodi first got that 89ad MBID.  So you get it whenever your tags have the MBID.  That happens even if you "fixed" the tag at some point and rescanned.

When you don't have an album artist MBID in your tags, Kodi matches artists using the artist name string, so finds "Various Artists" in the database and all is well.

Unfortunately, I don't know any good way to fix a bad MBID / artist name string pair in the database.  You might be able to import an xml or nfo file with a dummy MBID for "Everyone" but I don't have much hope that will work, because of exisitng album artist links in the database.

You might get away with editing the database outside of Kodi.  Find "Eveyone" in the artist table and delete the MBID for it.  Find "Various Artists" and add the correct MBID 89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377.  Then rescan all files with various artists and I think that should remove all song and album links to "Everyone", after which a "clean" should remove "Everyone" from the database.

At least if you can open your database in a db reader and look at the artist table to see if I am right about the MBID.

The only 100% reliable method I know without playing around in the database is

1.  Move all song files that mention Various Artists or Everyone in tags out of your source
2.  Update / clean the database.  This will remove the artist entries for "Everyone" and "Various Artists"
3.  In a tagging app, ensure all songs with "Various Artists" have the correct Album Artist or Artist MBID entry as appropriate.  Note that Album Artist ID tag only gets used if Album ID tag is also present.  Blank/null is also OK but having the MBID is better.   Also ensure you don't have any rogue "Everyone" tags (I'm sure you already did this).
4.  Move your song files back into your source and rescan.
5.  If you have local artist nfo files ensure artist.nfo for Various Aritsts has the correct MBID in it.  Something like

scott s.
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Thanks @scott967, but you'll notice in my previous responses that steps 1 and 2 didn't work for me. And in the end, my tags were straight from MusicBrainz, so I'm guessing others could run into this same situation if they have the same album I referenced.

I thought about just renaming the Everyone artist directly in the database as DaveBlake mentioned, but I wasn't sure what would happen if I then had 2 Various Artists, each with their own unique id.

@braz glad you got yourself sorted.

(2018-03-24, 21:59)braz Wrote: [ -> ]This could happen to anyone else who has the 1993 Various Artists album Bob Dylan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration though.
You'll notice track 13 on the second disc shows the artist as Everyone on musicbrainz.org.
https://musicbrainz.org/release/94fb18c0...a442427a90

That is an odd Musicbrainz entry, and yes ending up with "Various Artists" named as "Everyone" could happen to anyone with that album in their collection.

It is down to the simplistic way that Kodi currently handles the fact that Musicbrainz artist entries can have many alias names. Kodi just takes the first occurrance it processes as the name that belongs with that mbid. Most times this "take the first" approach is reasonable, but it is a bit of a surprize to discover that in Musicbrainz db "Various Artists" not only can be a song artist, but has alias names too. Here they all are alias for Various Artists. If that track 13 is the first music file with that artist mbid that Kodi scans, then that artist will be named "Everyone", and subsequent songs with album artist mbid (even if they have artist name "Various Artists") will appear under "Everyone".

I have looked at having a "Various Artists" entry in the library by default, as a solution to some multi-lingual music collection issues, but didn't get team approveal at the time. Since I am a single language guy I accepted that maybe I didn't understand the issue correctly, however the "Everyone" issue could also be avoided by doing that so I will revisit that idea (when I have time)

I have a distant dream of adding an alias handling facility, storing the alias variants and giving the user a way to pick the one to use as the main name, but it is a low priority. This is often what users need when they ask for an ability to remove individual artists.

(2018-03-24, 20:47)braz Wrote: [ -> ]Would it be possible to add a feature to remove individual artists/albums/songs using the context menu, similar to how it works for videos?

I understand that seems attractive from a user viewpoint, but it really doesn't fit in with the fundamantal way the music library works. Video is purely based on file names, removing a video entry from the lib is like removing or skipping a file. Artists and albums are derrived from tags and they have many to many relationships with songs (music files) removing one would also require all related items to be removed or the db would be left a mess.

What I don't understand and do want to look into is why cleaning didn't work for you. I know that having 2 levels of cleaning - a minor one that happens on lib update but does not remove missing music incase it is just temp unplugged, and a full one that removes missing music and all orphaned items - confuses some users, but that isn't the case here. Nor is running video clean by accident. When I test it cleaning works as expected for me, and I don't know what to try next.

(2018-03-24, 21:59)braz Wrote: [ -> ]I thought about just renaming the Everyone artist directly in the database as DaveBlake mentioned, but I wasn't sure what would happen if I then had 2 Various Artists, each with their own unique id.

You would have ended up with 2 "various artists" one with mbid and one without, a bit odd I agree but Kodi would havew coped. Better route is what you did.