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Missing artists in skin overview - Printable Version

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+--- Thread: Missing artists in skin overview (/showthread.php?tid=346325)



Missing artists in skin overview - HeresJohnny - 2019-08-15

I'm constantly noticing that albums in music overview are missing artists, like so

Image

When I look in the database I see that the table "album_artist" has lots of entries with "[MISSING TAG]". I'm assuming that these correspond to the albums showing up with no artist but I'm still investigating.

This leads me to some thoughts, though. Only for split artists or several artists should a tag "album artist" exist, cf. https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Encouraged_Tag_Standards#ALBUM_ARTIST . Not sure if Kodi is set up this way, but I would consider using the "album artist" tag uncondintionally as a starting point a design flaw, especially when the setting "Show song and album artist" is switched off.

Logic and common sense dictate that with setting "Show song and album artist" = OFF, tag evaluation should be:
a) IF NOT EXIST album artist SHOW artist
b) IF EXIST album artist AND artist ONLY SHOW album artist

With setting "Show song and album artist" = ON, tag evaluation should be:
a) IF NOT EXIST album artist SHOW artist
b) If EXIST album artist ALWAYS SHOW album artist AND ALWAYS SHOW artist


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - HeresJohnny - 2019-08-15

Just to pick one example of those albums shown, in the case of "Elton John / Leon Russell - The Union" the following tags are present in the files:
Code:

Artist Name : Elton John; Leon Russell
Album Artist : <not present>
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID : b83bc61f-8451-4a5d-8b8e-7e9ed295e822; d4cc0ed5-0f76-4188-9e14-2a23ca12188a
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID : <not present>

I see no reason why the artists should be missing in the skin overview.


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - DaveBlake - 2019-08-16

When tagging with mbids your music files need to have the full set of mbid tags that Kodi uses for all the files from an album. It is an all  or nothing situation. Having no ALBUMARTIST and no MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID tag values is a consistent pairing, but the lack of ablnum artist(s) it will cause Kodi to use the [Missing] artist as default.
Quote:Only for split artists or several artists should a tag "album artist" exist
I have no idea how you came to this conclusion, but it is the oppoisite of what is required.

Hirstorically (back to the days before the ALBUMARTIST tag became standard) Kodi will use the ARTIST tag as the album artist too if it does not find an ALBUMARTIST tag , however not when there are musicbrainz id tags. Your music files need ALBUMARTIST and MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID tag values  adding.


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - HeresJohnny - 2019-08-16

Sorry, but just no. Senselessly duplicated information is bad practice in any environment and there is absolutely no reason why artist should be ignored. Musicbrainz tags are a fingerprint that will be used to identify something without a doubt. So the artist tag without the corresponding musicbrainz_artist should yield a result that may sometimes be ambigous but is made unique by pairing it with the musicbrainz_artistid fingerprint. Kodi is going its own non-standard road by requiring this information to be duplicated to album artist and its corresponding musicbrainz tag. Best practice is what is recommended at hydrogenaudio.


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - DaveBlake - 2019-08-17

It really doesn't matter what you think is best practice, or what hydrogenaudio website says and there is no "should". I am telling you what Kodi does, and what you can do with tagging to avoid it if you don't like the consequences.


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - dm21912 - 2019-08-18

(2019-08-15, 21:03)HeresJohnny Wrote: Just to pick one example of those albums shown, in the case of "Elton John / Leon Russell - The Union" the following tags are present in the files:
Code:

Artist Name : Elton John; Leon Russell
Album Artist : <not present>
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID : b83bc61f-8451-4a5d-8b8e-7e9ed295e822; d4cc0ed5-0f76-4188-9e14-2a23ca12188a
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID : <not present>

I see no reason why the artists should be missing in the skin overview.

what are you using to tag music?

I cant fathom how its pulling the musicbrains id's for artist (and presumably release etc) but not album artist?


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - scott967 - 2019-08-18

My personal practice is to just use the artist mbid.  Never had a problem with that except in certain corner cases.  This is because typically there isn't an album mbid, and I use album artist to save an artist alias as there is no other way to do that.

scott s.
.


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - HeresJohnny - 2019-08-18

First of all, sorry if my posts sounded a bit heated. However, I have tried to adapt my practices to those recommended by Kodi to achieve better results. Originally, I come from foobar2000 and have mostly used Discogs as my go-to-tagger which has the largest database. I have only started to use musicbrainz with Kodi v17 when noticing inconsistent results for artists.

The effects of that are only now becoming clear to me, especially when Dave wrote

Quote:Hirstorically (back to the days before the ALBUMARTIST tag became standard) Kodi will use the ARTIST tag as the album artist too if it does not find an ALBUMARTIST tag , however not when there are musicbrainz id tags.

I'm using the foobar2000 implementation of the MB tagger which only writes MB_albumartist tags if the content is different from MB_artist. The programmers at hydrogenaudio are opposed to duplicating information from MB_artist to MB_albumartist - which I find perfectly reasonable.

On the other hand, Kodi seems to always use album_artist as a starting point. which frankly I find bewildering from a logical point of view. As I pointed out, I can see no logical argument FOR this behavior other than historical reasons and it being too much hassle to change it now. Delving into Kodis music role XMLs, I see only

<path>musicdb://artists/?albumartistsonly=true</path> (Album Artists only)
<path>musicdb://artists/?albumartistsonly=false</path> (All artists)

This is just the reverse logic of how it should be IMHO, see my first post and attempt to logically sort it


I see the dilemma that when the album artist tag DOES exist, only it should evaluated, excluding artists of compilations or split artists (to avoid artists that only appear on compilations). The more I think about it, the more I realize how Kodi's approach has merit. I think there is only a failsafe missing for "Show song and album artist"=OFF that goes like

IF NOT EXIST album artist TAG READ artist TAG

Update: I've just read through https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=266181 which seems to tackle this issue comprehensively and I see no immediate drawback to the "failsafe" I propose to avoid missing tags in the database.

Just to see what else is possible I need to ask, what arguments does musicdb://artists/ accept, is there a list?
Otherwise, I will have to attempt to change the appearance in the skin with a node, maybe.


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - HeresJohnny - 2019-08-18

(2019-08-18, 03:54)scott967 Wrote: I use album artist to save an artist alias as there is no other way to do that.

Same here for my wife's Japanese music collection where I add a Western written alias. MB has a certain arrogance in that they always write artists in their native language no matter if the software or the user can read it afterwards. But that's for another thread.


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - DaveBlake - 2019-08-18

(2019-08-18, 13:37)HeresJohnny Wrote: I'm using the foobar2000 implementation of the MB tagger which only writes MB_albumartist tags if the content is different from MB_artist. The programmers at hydrogenaudio are opposed to duplicating information from MB_artist to MB_albumartist - which I find perfectly reasonable.
It seems equally reasonable that when Kodi first became "Musicbrainz enabled" it took how Musicbrainz Picard tagged music files with mbid tags as the standard for how those tags would be applied, after all at the time Picard was the only way mbid tags were going to get added to files. The view of the people at Musicbrainz seems more relevant to use of mbid tags than that of the programmers at hydrogenaudio.

Now further along we have other scripts in other tools adding mbid tags and of course users manually editing things too, which can result in an inconsistent or partial set of tags. Tag handling in Kodi and the way that the music library entries are created from those tag values could be made yet more robust, I have already made several changes in that direction. But every time I tweek that process I risk messing things up for existing users so it is not something do be done lightly, especially when it is so easy to use Picard and generate a set of tags that Kodi was designed to work well with.

I am slowly accumulating a log of what tagging inconsistancies can catch Kodi out, no doubt I will do something about it eventually for yet more robustness.

(2019-08-18, 13:37)HeresJohnny Wrote: The more I think about it, the more I realize that Kodi's approach has merit. I think there is only a failsafe missing for "Show song and album artist"=OFF that goes like

IF NOT EXIST album artist TAG READ artist TAG

Just to see what else is possible I need to ask, what arguments does musicdb://artists/ accept, is there a list?
Otherwise, I will have to attempt to change the appearance in the skin with a node, maybe. 
@HeresJohnny not really sure why you have now switched in this thread to discussing folder type nodes and settings, I can only assume that you are confused.
 
The "Show song and album artists" setting simply effects what is displayed by the default artists node. It is really just for backwards compatibility and user familiarity, since it is just as easy to have an album artists node, and song and album artists node (as exist under the roles menu node where you found them) and organise them on your menu as suits you best.

But let's be very clear that option, and the node definitions, do not have any effect on the way that music file tags are used to build the library.


RE: Missing artists in skin overview - HeresJohnny - 2019-08-18

Well, since you know a great deal more about the inner workings of Kodi you should not interpret what I wrote but what I meant. I didn't realize until now that the Kodi option I mentioned before only changes the way things are displayed. Of course I meant my "fail safe" to be on library level, not on display level. But I assume you know that perfectly well.