I've tried to tackle this on my own, but i am giving up and asking for help.
I am on kodi version 19.1.0 (portable) using the Aeon Mq8 mod skin
What i am trying to achieve is to organize my soundtracks and various artists cd's under 1 Various artists catagory within the artist view, instead of showing the actual artist cd. However, I also want to show the actual artist info on the tracks when i've drilled down into the cd
I have my main music display set as the artist view, which works great until i get to items like soundtracks and compilations. Everything I've read says that the organization level is determined by the "albumartist" meta field. So I have set that field on my soundtrack cd's, but still it displays the cd's as separate artists, but this time it has changed the display name to just "various artists" but still gather's the same data for the artist.
I do have some compilation cd's that are where i want them to be so i thought i could just match those metadata fields. Their meta fields are albumartist, albumartist_credit,albumartist_sort all being set to Various Artists. However THAT hasn't even worked....so i'm at a loss at this point on how to get a soundtrack all under the same bucket without disturbing any of the rest of the metadata ; can someone please advise
Generally speaking, this is how most of my soundtracks are showing up
This is what they look like one level down
next level down on a cd
This is where i want them all to be
Some do show up here....but i don't really know why anymore...thought i knew..but still they do not
76 people have looked at this post and not a single reply?.....did i miss something obvious or what? or does nobody really know how this is done?
To get an album to be listed under the "Various Artists" artist, you need to either
1) Set the albumartist tag to be "various" / "various artists" or whatever one of those is in your localized language AND
2) Set the compilation tag to true
OR
Don't set an albumartist but ensure that each track has at least one artist set.
Try tagging you music collection wth MP3tag software. I use it here and with MusicBrainz movie soundtracks come out fine for me
Thank you both for the reply, I will try both your suggestions ( i feel like i've tried all these things at some point, but going to reattempt again). Will circle back I've been trying out beets.io which i'm pretty novice at, but i can do some simplish things with it....It's most appealing due to being able to automate the tagging process, where musicbrainz cannot be automated. so beets. But I'm going to try doing some tagging specificlly in mp3tag again and see if i get something different this time
nope....still doing THIS shit...
this is my structure
For arguments sake, i'm focusing on Killer instinct gold cuts soundtrack and metal slug 3D soundtrack
Here are the tags inside of MB
Killer instinct
Metal slug
do either of you see anything wrong with this?
note, each time i do a fresh re-import in of whatever changes i have made to a cd...meaning i remove it from the scanned directory, clean the library, and move the cd back into the scanned directory and update the library...so there should be no caching. I am trying this on a mostly vanilla build
Try as i might...i cannot get this to work out the way i want....BUUUUUT enabling the compilation tag did give an interesting result where soundtracks are showing up in the artists section and the compilations section so...........I think if i set the compilations tag to true....and then create a smart list to exclude anything in the soundtracks source and then set another smart list to only include soundtracks....i might be able to achieve a plausible solution....it is NOT ideal...but i've spent an absurd amount of time on what should be such a simple thing....correct me if my thinking is wrong on this ...but it's all i've got
Appreciate the frustration as it took ages to sort my collection as well.
Not come across beets.io but I looked at puddletag for linux, but that was a while ago. All I can say is that (by using MP3tag) clearing all the tags that were present in my music files first, then using MusicBrainz as the scraper sorted all of this for me.
Looking at the images above, could you issue be that some albums are not on Musicbrainz?? I had this issue for some of mine and that could be what's happening to you?
I suspect that you are editing the ALBUMARTIST tag, but leaving the MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID as the value for the unedited album artist. With this kind of inconsistent editing of tags Kodi will create separate entries of each artist (as indentified by mbid) but all called "Various Artists". When you have Musicbrainz ID tag values you can't just edit names without also editing the corresponding mbid value. But my advise would be not to mess with tagging in this way at all.
(2021-09-29, 01:42)Shredder_guitar Wrote: [ -> ]so is that not the same thing?
Nope. It needs to be plural.
ALBUMARTISTS tag is only relevent when the entire album is a collaboration between multiple artists e.g. classical music with composer, conductor, orchestra and soloist/choir, or "Riding with the King" by Eric Clapton and B.B. King.
When there is only one album artist, and "Various Artists" counts as one, and ALBUMARTISTS value is same as ALBUMARTIST and can be skipped without any consequnece.
So what is proper for a "soundtrack" then....without cluttering up the "artists" list with a bunch of people that i (personally) don't care at the artist level to see. I'm thinking a smart list is now the answer (i've never messed with them before in the past, but it's shaping up that way)
Honestly @
Shredder_guitar I don't understand why you would want to change the album artist of "Killer instinct gold cuts soundtrack" from "Robin Beanland" to "Various Artists". But, like I said in my post, if you do then change the MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID (and ALBUMARTISTS if one is present) tag value as well as the ALBUMARTIST tag to be consistent.
If you want fewer artists in the default artists node then either change it to show just album artists (and not those that make guest appearences or are only on tracks on compilation albums), or you can easily make a node for that.
As for soundtracks... some are credited to a consistent but sometimes multiple album artist(s) e.g. Gladiator soundtrack to Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard, others are credited to "Various Artists" with each track by someone separate. It seems like you don't even want "Hans Zimmer" and "Lisa Gerrard" in your artist list, and to achive that then you need to edit tagging but I suggest that you don't.
You could add all your soundtracks music as a separate source and filter using that.
Showing me Aeon MQ 8 screenshots is meaningless to me to be honest, I can't be bothered to enlarge them and workout what is being displayed. I don't understand what you issue is unless I have hit on it in someway in the above.