Kodi Community Forum

I have a quick question.

My recollection from past versions (Kodi 17 I think) is that when applying the album artist view in the music library (or in system/music library settings selecting showing album artist only), albums shown under the album artist also contained albums with the underlying songs from that album artist where the album itself was not of that specific album artist: So as an example, I have Adele as album artist, under album artist I then I see the albums where Adele is the album artist, but in the same view I also see Albums (and the specific underlying songs) where Adele is the artist but the album artist is a different one (e.g. various artists).

I can't replicate this in Kodi 18-19 anymore. I either only see albums that belong to that album artist, or (what I don't want) the artist view where the number of artists explodes because the criterium is artist in stead of album artist.

So, has the described functionality disappeared in Kodi 18 onwards or am I missing something in applying the right settings? (In general I use MusicBrainz picard for tagging, with the albumartists field added to MusicBrainz standard tags.

Yes the current "show album artists only" option on the artists nodes (applied either by default setting or as a node parameter) gets applied to both the list of artists and the list of albums for that artist when you click on the artist. Showing only album artists, you only see their albums and not those that they make guest appearences on just some tracks.

It changed some versions back when the ability to control what albums were shown was added, the idea was to add functionality simply as possible.  I agree that it would be better to have separate node options for "Show album artists only" and "Show guest apppearences". I personaly would probably make it a toggle on sideblade too, but others like to minimise user controls for the 10ft/TV remote UI simplicity. Anyway thanks for the reminder, it could bump higher on my todo list for v20.

Meanwhile, no it isn't an option in Kodi but you could choose to use Yatse on an Android tablet or phone to browse your music library and control playback. This has exactly the options that you want for showing artists and albums, and lots more powerful dynamic filtering too. It also means that you can listen to music without having to turn on the TV.