[mknabster]

Hi everyone, I have recently been cleaning out my file server i use for Kodi, and centralizing everything into a mysql Kodi database. I have never loaded my music in before, but i thought now might be a good time to try and give me a reason to clean the server out a bit. So i have a bunch of Mix CDs that i have created over the years, back when my car actually had a CD player at least, and when i scanned them all in, my older CDs showed up as compilation albums which is what i was hoping for, but then my newer ones did not. The newer ones ended up being broken out by artist and with several artists per disc, there were duplicate CDs.

I use dbpoweramp to maintain the tags for each CD and song, but i haven't been able to pinpoint the difference between the old CDs and new CDs as to why they are scanning in differently. I did try a few things like mimicking the tags but it didn't make a difference for some reason. If you need examples of a CD or two let me know and i'll upload a couple. Any ideas on what could be wrong? Thanks!

[DaveBlake]

The difference will be how they are tagged, and not sure what you tried when you say "mimicking".

The simple answer for me to give is to tell you to edit the tags using Picard, but to be honest there is probably a simple answer using dbpoweramp or any other tagging software. Tagging consistently isn't hard.

Assuming that you are not adding Musicbrainz Id tags, but just basic tags like ALBUM, ARTIST, TITLE, YEAR, COMPILATION etc.,  Kodi puts together songs on a compilation album if

    1. album name is non-empty
AND
    2a. no tracks have same track number
   OR
    2b. all tracks are marked as part of compilation
AND
    3a. a unique album artist is specified as "various", "various artists" or the localized value
    OR
    3b. we have at least two primary song artists and no album artist specified.

My guess would be that ALBUM tag is inconsistent, or that you have ALBUMARTIST tag values as well as ARTIST ones.

See if you can figure it out from that, otherwise show me the tag values you have. I would rather avoid uploads of music files if possible.

[mknabster]

Thanks for the breakdown of what Kodi looks for, this was helpful! After i looked at the tags for the ones that work and the ones that don't, i noticed that some of the track numbers were a bit off, or not there at all. Once i populated that value with the right ones, they scanned in as expected. So now i just need to go through 150 Cds and fix that; next project before the end of the year! Thanks so much and Merry Christmas!