[azido]

Hey there,

is it possible to manually add a new (personally chosen) role entry to the music database? If yes, how?

[scott967]

For ID3 use TMCL tag (frame).  For APE/FLAC use PERFORMER formatted artist[,artist]  (role) example:
 

Code:

Hilary Hahn (violin)

Violin will then be an artist grouping in the "roles" node.

I use this to create a role of "songwriter" to distinguish it from "composer".

scott s.
.

[azido]

Thanks for the FLAC syntax. For MP3 i found MUSICIANCREDITS -> role:Some Name; to be working, obviously that didn't work for FLAC.
Is it possible to sort that value inside Kodi like Name, Some as in ARTISTSORT or do i have to take that name like i've entered it?

[DaveBlake]

Is it possible to sort that value inside Kodi like Name, Some as in ARTISTSORT or do i have to take that name like i've entered it?

Kodi stores all the names from PERFORMER/TMCL tags in the artists table same as it does with album artists and song artists, if that DB entry has a sortname then Kodi will use that. The trickier part is getting the sort names into the database, at least trickier to explain rather than do!

Tagging does not have a sort tag for performers or other contributors, and there is no way to automatically make "Last, First" from a name string, sort names need to be given data.  Kodi will match up on name, so those artists contributing a role that are also an album or song artist (on the same or some other track) can get sort name that way. You can also scrape artist information, including sort name, from local artist.nfo files located in a correctly named subfolder the Artist Information Folder. Normally, to reduce server load and scraping time, only song and album artists get scraped. Many users will have role data unawares and not use it, so scaping those musicians, producers etc. would be wasteful. So to set scraping going you would have to go to a node showing those contributors and select "Query for All" from the context menu.

But note while you will then be able to sort contributors when listed on an artists node by this sort name, you won't be able to use it for songs. A song can have many contributors with many roles, sorting by them would be meaningless.

[azido]

Hey Dave,

thanks for the explanation.

Still going to realize my idea of having releases from different groups/aliases shown up under the main artist(s) name with some success.

What i have done so far in an example:

* created a new role "Member" by using either PERFORMER tag for FLAC albums like PERFORMER -> Atticus Ross (member) or  MUSICIANCREDITS -> member:Atticus Ross; for MP3 albums. For some reason using TMCL as a tag did not work for me, maybe wrong syntax?
* Always tagged all songs of a given album with that (as i just don't want to get too acribic, only want to show some general relationships)
* used the node editor to point directly to that new role "Member". "Show only Albumartists" is set to false here .After doing the above and scanning the albums into database, Atticus Ross is showing up in that node like expected. 
* From here i can scrape useful informations for Atticus Ross, assign a picture and even a fanart. Atticus Ross does NOT show up in the main artists node, which is good. By entering his entry, i can see (and access/play) all albums he is set as being a member of.

So far, so good. But as that node will get populated more, i'm looking for a way to sort by surnames. So, if i get you right, the following should work:

a) scrape infos for those artists in this node
b) when done, ask kodi to export music database stuff to files so all that info/gfx get stored in the Artist Information Folder (btw: when will we be able to export a single entry only ? )
c) for those where no scraped info is available, create an artist.nfo by hand and put it in the AIF.
d) edit those artist.nfo files and add <sortname>Surname, Name</sortname>
e) rescrape artist information, but this time from local files

Am i right?

Edit: tested, works

[azido]

* created a new role "Member" by using either PERFORMER tag for FLAC albums like PERFORMER -> Atticus Ross (member) or  MUSICIANCREDITS -> member:Atticus Ross; for MP3 albums. For some reason using TMCL as a tag did not work for me, maybe wrong syntax?

Found out that i can use tag "performer:member" regardless of FLAC or MP3 files in Picard which makes the process a lot easier. I begin to like Picard