Hi, with classical music, it seems that all the Russian artists and composers' names are displayed in Cyrillic. How do I get them to display in English? The music files I have are tagged in English. Somehow the display language is overridden, but only for names.
Update: it's not only Russian, but certain non-English artists. For example the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is displayed in Hebrew.
If you use a scraper, then probably it is getting info from Musicbrainz. MB policy is to use the artist's native script and spelling, with alias for other languages. But, there is a media music setting "prefer online information" toggle that determines if the artist name from your song tags, or the preferred MB name is used.
Note that it is also possible via the Kodi "artists" tag to have the database artist name taken from the "artists" tag, with the "artist" tag only being used as a display name for the affected song (but you also need to use "albumartists" tag for the album to be consistent).
For example. Say you have a "song" file from Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6. The song would be the first movement (in MB speak a recording of a work which is "part of" the work "Symphony No. 6").
The MB song artist is Пётр Ильич Чайковский with MBID 9ddd7abc-9e1b-471d-8031-583bc6bc8be9
Normally you would scrape this as the song "artist" and "artist MBID" during tagging outside of Kodi. But you could add the "artists" tag as Piotr Ilitch Tchaïkovski. You could also add the "sortname" tag as Tchaïkovski, Piotr Ilitch (in MB, sortnames are in Latin script).
This gives you the following:
when listing songs, the song artist will display Пётр Ильич Чайковский
when listing artists, the artist will display as Piotr Ilitch Tchaïkovski or Tchaïkovski, Piotr Ilitch depending on your "use artist sortname" toggle.
Note that there is some flexibility on how song labels are displayed. TBH I haven't played around with the syntax for that, other than to add the disknumber to the default.
If you have the Cyrillic artist name in your library already with MBID, you could edit the artists table with a sqlite editor, or remove all instances of songs that tag that artist from your music source (including role contributors like composer), do an update and clean (gets rid of artist in library) then return the affected files and rescan/scrape with appropriate settings/tags from above.
Keep in mind role contributors are also stored in Kodi db as "artists" so you might need to massage some of your other tags (or use role tag name string as a "feature") Watch out for "ensemble" for example.
BTW, in Kodi 20 beta 1 your Hebrew orchestra name should properly render RTL. In Kodi 19 and prior that's not guaranteed.
scott s.
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Thank you, Scott. I will try out your suggestions.