Posts: 4,545
Joined: Jun 2015
Reputation:
269
Looking at this MB entry who ever created it used "Barber" in the albumartist and albumartists, but "Samuel Barber" in artist, artists and composer tags. No idea if this meets the MB standards per se, from what I have seem some people do it that way others don't.
Of course you are not a slave to Picard, and when I have had things like that I have just edited the tags to all read "Samuel Barber". Much of classical music tagging still has manual adjustments to be made.
I want to implement an alias name facility in Kodi to cover this kind of issue, but that won't happen in v17 (not enough time). Meanwhile mixed names for an individual can cause some confusion, even with mbids to identify them uniquely.
At the moment Kodi takes the first name it gets with an artist mbid as the name. If this was the first Barber album scanned into the library will unfortunately create an entry for 74ed34ce-ee95-44e9-a87d-4d2d5056c24a as "Barber", because album artist is the first entry it encounters but "Samuel Barber" will be held in the song artist desciption, and gets displayed in some places.
"Baber" will then be what you see in the artists node or in a custom node of composers despite that the composer tag said "Samuel Barber". You see album artist gave mbid a name, artist had a different name for that mbid and composer matched the artist name so identified ineffect the composer mbid. I know that taking the first scanned does not give the user the control over which of a number of alias names gets used, but it is where we currently are.
I will have a think an see if there is a way that Kodi can make a better job of this default Picard tagging before we have an alias facility. Meanwhile the work aboud is to change the albumartist and albumartists tags in Picard to say "Samuel Barber".
Make any sense?
Posts: 27
Joined: Mar 2016
Reputation:
0
That's pretty much what I assumed, however now I know for sure I can check and correct as necessary.
As always the problem is to get consistancy across all albums, including any not on Musicbrainz, so that Kodi has a chance to know that, in this case, Barber and Samuel Barber, are the same. Perhaps a way to manually 'join' all spellings of an artists/composers name, as in JS Bach, J.S.Bach, etc. would be an idea for future versions, with a SORT order to list them as Bach, J.S.?
For classical albums ALBUMARTISTS has always struck me unnecessary. For this album I have COMPOSER, ORCHESTRA, CONDUCTOR (and PERFORMER) tagged along with associated SORT tags, however Musicbrainz, annoyingly, doesn't include GENRE and insists on using PERFORMER(ORCHESTRA) rather than ORCHESTRA so I don't envy you trying to make sense of all the tagging schemes out there.
Posts: 4,545
Joined: Jun 2015
Reputation:
269
Naming consistency with non-Musicbrainz tagged music is down to personal vigellance. Yes sort name and variations on name (allowing you to choose your prefered one, and collect them) are both on my todo list.
v17 can cope with both PERFORMER(orchestra) and ORCHESTRA, knows they are the same kind of information.
Genre I feel is a subjective thing, so don't miss MB telling me what others think it should be. Because Kodi offers genre as a fundamental filter I use it as a custom tag to label my music with multiple categories. What catagories work for you will depend on your tastes. e.g. if you have a tiny classical selection then just having genre = classical will be enough to separate it from the pop, otherwise you could split by historic periods e.g. Baroque, Romantic etc, or by kind of work e.g. choral, ballet, symphony, concerto, quartet etc. or both. The variations are endless, and I have used a mixture for my collection.
Genre in Kodi is currently song genre too, and each song can have multiple values, so an album can contain songs with different genres. As an example I have added a genre of "overture" to the tracks on an album that are overtures (rather than a symphony often the main work). With genre I can now find all my "British" "Overtures" (by the likes of Vaughn Williams or Elgar etc.), or "choral" music. I hope to implement "work" one day too, meanwhile genre can be a powerful tool.
In popular music I have flagged the female vocal from the male, bands and instrumentals, amongst other things. It does make for a full genre node, but it also helps me access just the music I feel like.
Posts: 27
Joined: Mar 2016
Reputation:
0
Genre is a fairly broad brush. Both Classical and 'Chamber Music' are standard genres but one would preclude the other. For the sake of 'standardness' I've gone for using the Classical genre and putting Baroque, Romantic etc. in Mood. You could use GROUP, then filter by GENRE and then by MOOD but you have to draw the line somewhere.
Although MOOD (I don't think) gets read at the moment perhaps you could pencil it in for v20 of Kodi.
Naming consistency, even with Musicbrainz files, is a problem. That is how this thread got started. Best solution I've found so far is to use Qoobar for tagging. While it does have it's own idiosyncrasies a scan with Picard, then fill in the blanks with Qoobar covers most things. As a backup Tagscanner to copy existing tags to a file before clearing them.
Posts: 4,545
Joined: Jun 2015
Reputation:
269
Kodi v17 reads MOOD, both for song (from tag) and for artist (from NFO). Skins can display it, although I don't know if they all do. It is just a bit of text, no codification of values etc, much like a comment.
IMO it is a mistake to put Baroque, Romantic etc. in Mood rather than genre, but I guess it depends on your music collection and how you want to use it. Kodi UI is designed to make navigation by genre easy and powerful. For example there is a genre node that will list all the genres to let you choose what to play. In comparison mood is just a bit of text, I don't see that changing anytime soon. I tag all my non-popular music with genre of "Classical" so I can keep collections separate within a single library, and then have extra genre values for "Baroque", "Overture" etc. Electic perhaps, but suits the way I select what to play.
Creating a well tagged library is still non-trivial, but hopefully you will find it rewarding in the long term.
