[sillyboy42]

Running Kodi 16 on my QNAP TS-251.

I just cleaned up my music library by running it through musicbrainz picard. Now I'm seeing duplicate artist entries when browsing by artist but only for some albums. I checked the artist vs. album artist fields and they're identical. I've updated the tags and still seeing the problem. I've removed my entire library and re-added. I've added just the one artist I see this issue with consistently. I'm at a loss on what the issue could be.

Any suggestions on what to check next?

[scott967]

Well, you have to consider the MusicBrainz Id for the artist. I borked my library by doing this:

1. There is an artist in MB by name Hiromi Uehara and with MBID
2. There is another artist in MB by name Hiromi: the Trio Project with another MBID

I had some tag errors such that the name string "Hiromi: The Trio Project" had the MBID for "Hiromi". That messed up my library. Later I added some songs from the same album by artist "Hiromi: The Trio Project" but with the correct MBID. So, I fixed it in my tags so all are consistent. But when I did a library update, it couldn't be fixed. I think the only way to correct it is to remove all songs with an artist or album artist that has wrong MBID and do an update/clean (to remove all traces of the artist) then restore the song files and update again to get the right data in the database.

Bottom line is for artists there are a couple of cases to consider:

1. There is an artist or album artist tag but no artist MBID.
2. There is an artist or album artist tag with artist MBID that is correct
3. There is an artist or album artist tag with artist MBID that is wrong

If you have song files with case 1 and/or 2 you are probably OK. But if you also have case 3 mixed in there you probably have a hosed database for that artist.

So we need to see all the tags that picard generated for the problem artists. We (or you) can also probably look at your music database with a SQL viewer app and see what actually got into the database.

scott s.
.

[Syncopation]

scott967: thx for that insightful post. I keep running into trouble with cover art and when fixing things in the metadata, I also find it hard, to get the fixes reflected in kodi. often times, it helps as you suggest, to remove the files, clean library and re-add the files. then update the library. but there should be a better way to force an update of metadata inside of kodi without requiring the user to leave kodi, fiddle with moving files and then going back to kodi.

[sillyboy42]

What's strange is it only seems to be pulling this information from this Artists field - not Artist, not Album Artist.

For example: When the Artists field is "Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield" - I get a duplicate entry for this artist only. However, musicbrainz wants that field to be "Al Kooper; Mike Bloomfield" and when that happens I have two artists listed - Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. Both artists have one album and it's the same album.

[scott967]

What's strange is it only seems to be pulling this information from this Artists field - not Artist, not Album Artist.

For example: When the Artists field is "Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield" - I get a duplicate entry for this artist only. However, musicbrainz wants that field to be "Al Kooper; Mike Bloomfield" and when that happens I have two artists listed - Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. Both artists have one album and it's the same album.

The "Artists" tag is intended to deal with the case that the "artist" tag exists and represents more than one individual artist, but uses something other than the normal item separator. When Artists is used artist MBID should also be used, with the same number of items in the same order. Then only the artists named in the "artists" tag get added as Kodi music artists. In this case "artists" results in adding both the artists, as you discovered, and both are shown in artist library mode (assume music settings are for both song and album artist display). Of course, if you also have an "album artist" set on these songs, and it is different from the "artists" it will be interpreted as new/different.

Browsing Musicbrainz, it appears the "release artist" (album artist) should be the same as the song artist. So you would need also the "albumartists" tag, albumartist MBID and release (album) MBID to be set in your tags.

In sum you need:

TPE1: Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield
ARTISTS: Al Kooper
ARTISTS: Mike Bloomfield
MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID: d6bee229-1957-4891-8d44-c56ac7ea259e
MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID: 1be2e508-905c-4d90-9bf2-7ab55f78b3e6
TPE2: Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield
ALBUM ARTISTS: Al Kooper
ALBUM ARTISTS: Mike Bloomfield
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID: d6bee229-1957-4891-8d44-c56ac7ea259e
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID: 1be2e508-905c-4d90-9bf2-7ab55f78b3e6
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ID: d14c84cf-3b1a-4a3a-8826-f267726f2236

For eg: The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper

Result is album and songs will appear in library views for both artist Al Kooper and artist Mike Bloomfield, with either "show song and album artists" setting on /off.

Album (music) info and song info should display artist as Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield

scott s.
.

[sillyboy42]

Excellent - thanks for your assistance. I think I get it now!