The Music 'rethink' Thread
#1
Since there's only one developer working on the Music library, we can't expect miracles, but I thought it would be good to at least discuss some of the flaws / limitations of the Music library and perhaps stimulate a rethink on the longer term future?

I'll start with my view - but others can add as they see fit.


1) Lack of support for anything other than Albums

Over the years, I've become increasingly frustrated with Kodi's general assumption that all song belong to an album. Technically it doesn't assume this, but in terms of viewing your media sensibly, this assumption is quite strong.

As a result of this, Kodi is particularly weak at handling EPs, Singles, One off songs etc.

An EP in a logical sense, is still a collection of tracks (like an Album)
A 'single' is quite often a collection of tracks too (like an Album)
A 'one off song' is truly a one off orphaned song which belongs to no other 'group' (barring all other one off songs!)

With this in mind, it would be nice if it was possible to distinguish an EP, or a Single or 'One off' via the UI and still allow people to tag and organise their music with regular tagging software.

In the very crudest sense any 'album' that contained the string '(EP)' could be designated as an EP. Likewise a Single (with multiple tracks) could use '(Single)' as a designator.

Now I'm not specifically proposing that there should be keyword searches in media paths to discover EPs and Singles etc (it was only an example), but Kodi is definitely lacking in the ability to distinguish these types of collections.


2) Compilation Albums

There are a number of techniques that Kodi uses to identify compilation albums, but there's no formal method of unambiguously declaring a compilation album (that I know of). I think it would be good if there was a way to do this (perhaps addressing it in the same way as EPs and Singles etc).
There are quite a few posts where people ask for the best practices to deal with compilation albums - which is an indication that people are struggling with it (or can't find the best documentation).


3) Mixed Media

One in a while, someone makes a box sex, or a DVD etc that also comes with an audio album. Most commonly this is with a Live Concert dvd + audio disc.
There's no easy way to deal with this situation other than to split up the box sex and put the DVD in your video files structure and the audio disc in your Music file structure.
This is probably a wider Kodi issue than music alone, but I think it's something worth thinking about.


4) Music Videos

Is this a Music or a Video issue?
Music Videos is very 'single' (music video) oriented. There is a notable lack of support for the fairly common Music DVD (live concert / documentary / album).
Sure, people can make it a 'Movie' (which is what I do), and you could give it a genre tag as a means to help differentiate it.
Is the current situation good enough for now? - probably
Is it really the best solution? - probably not.
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#2
As that one dev in music corner at the moment this thread is most welcome, but afraid progess will be slow. As I've said elsewhere, both music video and streaming integration is on the fridges of my interest, but I will keep it in mind. If there is any low hanging friut then I am up for it (but unless you have looked inside Kodi don't presume anything is easy even if it seems obvious).
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#3
(2016-08-06, 15:24)DaveBlake Wrote: As that one dev in music corner at the moment this thread is most welcome, but afraid progess will be slow. As I've said elsewhere, both music video and streaming integration is on the fridges of my interest, but I will keep it in mind. If there is any low hanging friut then I am up for it (but unless you have looked inside Kodi don't presume anything is easy even if it seems obvious).

Dave,

How about the setting for showing albumartist > album (I know you provided it with a different name). Is this something we can expect in Krypton? Thanks.

Regards,

Bart
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#4
I've done the work, but it needs others to approve it.
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#5
I have a lot of Music Concerts that I play using Kodi (with a bit of a hack)

I'd love to be able to add those to the Kodi Music Video library but I'm struggling to see how that's going to work as Concerts are more like 'albums' than the way Kodi uses Music Videos - which looks at artist and title and doesn't seem to support grouping, they are stand-alone files like 'movies'.

For convenience I've split all my concerts into individual folders per concert and into individual files per concert song. The hack is to create a M3U playlist for each concert and add of the concert's song files to the playlist. All my playlists are copied to the Userdata/Playlists/Mixed folder so now my iPad Kodi Music Remote app sees those playlists and I can play any song from any concert (and create a playlist from the Playlists).

What I'd like to do is just 'scan' the 'Music Videos' folder on my NAS with Kodi and it would recognise each concert folder as an 'album' and group each folder's files as its songs (much the same as scanning audio albums into Kodi's music library, except there's no tags. But since it is a 'concert' then use the file names as the song titles.

So my question is, is there a way to do what I want for Concert Videos using the current Music Video database and scan using nfo files? Or does there need to be a change in Kodi to support the concept of a 'group of music videos' (aka an 'album' or a 'concert')?

Lack of support for Music Concerts is my single biggest issue with Kodi for music, everything else is OK compared to this feature.

I'm quite happy to write an app to create nfo files to support something that's already in place in Kodi but seems there's limited info available in the Wiki or elsewhere. Any advice, ideas welcome please.

Dave, is there anything you can provide regarding support for grouping music videos in current Kodi 16 or upcoming 17 please?
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#6
(2016-08-07, 07:07)HomerJau Wrote: What I'd like to do is just 'scan' the 'Music Videos' folder on my NAS with Kodi and it would recognise each concert folder as an 'album' and group each folder's files as its songs (much the same as scanning audio albums into Kodi's music library, except there's no tags. But since it is a 'concert' then use the file names as the song titles.

The difficulties begin in that the music library is based upon scanning music file tags. It can read tag data from mp4 files, so I am guessing that if you tagged your music videos then it could scan thing into the library. I say guessing because I have no media to test with and I have never tried. In many ways parsing path and file names to guess the content and then hope to lookup info online, like video has to, would be a backward step for music.

I know that some people dream of just throwing media at Kodi, and some audio fingerprint software automatically identifying it and completing all the details;. maybe, one day.... Meanwhile there are plenty using off line systems, or with obscure music, and the control freaks like myself that tag specifically to get a library organised as we like.

Quote:Dave, is there anything you can provide regarding support for grouping music videos in current Kodi 16 or upcoming 17 please?

Changes/fixes to v16 are frozen, and v17 is now beta so there are limits on what can be added (with 2 Kodi releases a year the deadlines come around fast). So tbh the answer is no, I don't think so.

Perhaps make your music videos more like music by tagging them? I don't know that will work, or even if you can do that, but I think it is the quickest path forward. IMO video would benefit from better tagging use too.
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#7
I tried some nfo files based on info I could find:

For each song in a Concert/music video folder, example for first song file (which has a matching nfo file):

01. Breathe.mkv
01. Breathe.nfo

Contents of nfo:

<musicvideo>
<title>01. Breathe</title>
<artist>David Gilmour</artist>
<album>Remember That Night</album>
<genre>Progressive Rock</genre>
<runtime>3:20</runtime>
<year>2007</year>
<track>1</track>
<music video/>

Will scan each music file/nfo pair into the Music Video database and all the song files can be accessed from the Kodi Music Video view by Artist, Album, Genre and Year.

So I'm going to write a little app that will auto create all the nfo files for each of my Concert folders and their music files. Then I'll scan them all into the DB.

I can't find how to add the Concert video cover art or fanart to the concert folder. Nothing I've tried seems to work:

If I do this folder structure:

\Music Videos\Artist\ConcertName\(all the song files)

I can add artist thumbnail (folder.jpg) and artist fanart (fanart.jpg) to the Artist folder and that gets displayed in Kodi when scrolling through the music video library. But I can't get any images to appear when looking at the list of artist video concerts/folders. Any ideas?

BTW: The <track/> node in the music file nfo is not used currently by Kodi as the library view of the concert/music video tracks is sorted by title. That's why my example above has the song title prefixed with '01.' - so the concerts songs are in correct sequence for playback. Having said that it might be my Skin. I will check that out tomorrow.
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#8
Thanks Dave. Does Kodi read tags from MKV files?

I just posted what I discovered today. That is better than I thought and reasonably easy to set up since all my concerts are already well organised with folder names (David Gilmour - Remember That Night) and all my concert videos split into chapters/songs as individual files named after each track number and song title.

Maybe all that's needed in 17 is just a refreshed/updated music video view that shows the track and removes the year (as every song in a concert is that same year)

I'll post a couple screen grabs tomorrow.
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#9
(2016-08-07, 11:05)HomerJau Wrote: I tried some nfo files based on info I could find:

For each song in a Concert/music video folder, example for first song file (which has a matching nfo file):

01. Breathe.mkv
01. Breathe.nfo

Contents of nfo:

<musicvideo>
<title>01. Breathe</title>
<artist>David Gilmour</artist>
<album>Remember That Night</album>
<genre>Progressive Rock</genre>
<runtime>3:20</runtime>
<year>2007</year>
<track>1</track>
<music video/>

Will scan each music file/nfo pair into the Music Video database and all the song files can be accessed from the Kodi Music Video view by Artist, Album, Genre and Year.

So I'm going to write a little app that will auto create all the nfo files for each of my Concert folders and their music files. Then I'll scan them all into the DB.

I can't find how to add the Concert video cover art or fanart to the concert folder. Nothing I've tried seems to work:

If I do this folder structure:

\Music Videos\Artist\ConcertName\(all the song files)

I can add artist thumbnail (folder.jpg) and artist fanart (fanart.jpg) to the Artist folder and that gets displayed in Kodi when scrolling through the music video library. But I can't get any images to appear when looking at the list of artist video concerts/folders. Any ideas?

BTW: The <track/> node in the music file nfo is not used currently by Kodi as the library view of the concert/music video tracks is sorted by title. That's why my example above has the song title prefixed with '01.' - so the concerts songs are in correct sequence for playback. Having said that it might be my Skin. I will check that out tomorrow.




For a music video, fanart.jpg and poster.jpg should work (as per normal movie).
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#10
Thanks AnalogKid. The album folder and fanart shows if I don't have the upper level Artist folder.

So if I have no parent Artist folder and just have a folder per Concert then the Library shows the cover art and fanart for each concert:

\Music Videos\David Gilmour - Remember That Night\(video files, nfo files, folder.jpg, fanart.jpg)
\Music Videos\David Gilmour - Live In Gdansk\(video files, nfo files, folder.jpg, fanart.jpg)
Etc
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#11
After creating nfo files for all my concert folders and files I get this in Kodi Music Video Library views (using Confluence):

Edit: This is using a folder arrangement of '\Music Videos\Artist - ConcertName\' so the cover art and fanart gets displayed in the Kodi Music Video library (3rd image below). The Artist images (first view) come from my Kodi Music Library - which is good and bad. Bad because if I don't have an artist in Music I dont get an image in Music Videos for that artist.

Artists:
Image

Artists Concerts/Music Videos:
Image

Songs:
Image



Issues:
There are no covers in the list of music videos for the Artist (the 2nd view) - would be nice for the view to find the 'folder.jpg'

There should be a 2nd David Gilmour concert but it has not been scanned by Kodi as it has .vob files. I guess there must be a setting to add .vob to a format for music videos. Anyone know about this. (edit: I converted all my vob DVD files to MKV with a simple batch file and MKVToolnix - now all show in Kodi menus above)

So apart from the two issues above it works quite well (no need for Year as all the songs from each concert were filmed at same time)

My app needs a bit of extra work to grab the Year from the folder name but it created all the nfo files for 150 odd concerts, probably 3000 nfo in no time. I'd like to get it to scrape The Movie Database as they are all there...
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#12
Nice solution HomerJau.

What do you do if you want to play the full concert from start to finish?
How do you handle extra material, like pre show intervju etc?

Organizing Concerts is one of the weaknesses in Kodi imo.
I scrape them as Movies and use modified Video nodes to separate them from the "normal" Movied.
For some I have created bookmarks for certain songs, but it would be nice to have that automated somehow.
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#13
One way for collect music videos (shows, concerts), use scraper themusicvideodb, mod by MarcosQui

http://files.xbmcbrasil.net/Scrapers/met...db.org.zip

Define folder content in file manager = music videos

Active option Use folder name for lookups

Get data and arts collected via themoviedb*, work ok, similar movies.

* Have many shows available.

So no have parent Artist folder and just have a folder per Concert then the Library shows the cover art and fanart and data for each concert:

MusicVideos\Adele - Live at the Royal Albert Hall
MusicVideos\Within Temtptation - Burn Us

Other way, scraper like movies, and split contents using smartplaylist (create rule based path for folder with music videos).
MediaBrazil forum Website - Youtube Channel
MQ9-1.6.0.29 - 09.15.2023 - Aeon MQ Skin Team
MarcosQui Website Donate and support us.
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#14
@Ladida: Kodi has a setting to play next item, so if I select the first song all the others in the folder are played automatically. With my Intel NUC there's just a very slight pause between, it's almost 'gapless' even for 1080p DTS-HDMA videos. (My NUC is an i3 early gen so later i5 may be even better).

I'm going to try using MediaElch Concert nfo files tomorrow in my app as I scrapped all my concerts today and almost everyone was recognised and scrapped, a couple were spelling mistakes in my folder names (either Artist or the Video name not found but it's pretty 'fuzzy' in its search, so it gets most videos - only does one at a time).

MediaElch has a Concert scrapper that grabs: Disc info (Artist, title, description, rating, release date etc), folder (cover) art and fanart automatically from the folder name alone if in the format: [Artist] - [Concert/Disc Release Title]. Example: David Gilmour - Live in Gdansk. Unfortunatley it doesn't like a date on the end, such as (2007), so that has to be removed in its search dialog.

But really all MediaElch is getting that I didn't already have was some fanart, I already had the cover art, although MediaElch found higher res covers in some instances. So it's not really needed as currently Kodi's Music Video library doesn't seem to use any of the metadata apart from Artist, Album (concert/disc release name), Year and Genre.

The song info comes from the nfo files and those nfo files my app creates from the music file contents (see earlier post) and the folder name. I'm thinking the additional data from MediaElch scrapping The Movie Database might be useful in a future Kodi release, but 16.1 and probably 17 probably not.

So now, if you name your Music Video folder: 'Artist - Concert Name' and you split the music source (BD, DVD etc) into chapters (per song) then run my app then scan into Kodi Music Library you get what you see above.

I've used MKVToolNix to split most my stuff and that's pretty painless, except having to manually rename the chapters to match the track number and song title (I will semi automate that at some stage - from a text file (maybe), containing a list of titles/songs since that can be found easily, copy and paste off a webpage for example, then auto rename the media files from that)

Be nice if Kodi 17 could show folder.jpg and fanart.jpg at the 'album' level of the Music Video library view (Dave?)

More tomorrow...
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#15
(2016-08-08, 11:37)Wanilton Wrote: One way for collect music videos (shows, concerts), use scraper themusicvideodb, mod by MarcosQui

http://files.xbmcbrasil.net/Scrapers/met...db.org.zip

Define folder content in file manager = music videos

Active option Use folder name for lookups

Get data and arts collected via themoviedb*, work ok, similar movies.

* Have many shows available.

So no have parent Artist folder and just have a folder per Concert then the Library shows the cover art and fanart and data for each concert:

MusicVideos\Adele - Live at the Royal Albert Hall
MusicVideos\Within Temtptation - Burn Us

Other way, scraper like movies, and split contents using smartplaylist (create rule based path for folder with music videos).

Thanks. Looks interesting. Edit: I will check that out today.

I'm happier to do the scrapping offline (external to Kodi) so I can tweak naming and choose between different releases so I'll probably keep going down the outside Kodi route then get Kodi to scrape complete/accepted files and metadata, at least until Kodi supports something more complete. Smile

I don't mind hacking away at some code (I'm a retired programmer, gives me something to do when I'm not listening to music!)
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The Music 'rethink' Thread0