[graham-h]

The wiki on tagging lists various Vorbis tags that Kodi is supposed to recognise (eg COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR) but I can't get these to work.

I'm ripping from EAC to single FLACs with cuesheets and my FLACs end up tagged with ALBUMARTIST, ARTIST, which Kodi recognises, and COMPOSER and PERFORMER which seem to be ignored. In the embedded cuesheet, the heading contains PERFORMER which overrides the ALBUMARTIST tag and each track has a PERFORMER which overrides ARTIST (all as expected). Any COMPOSER or CONDUCTOR tags in the cuesheet are ignored AFAICT.

How do I tag a compilation album that has a different composer, conductor and other performers for each track?

[DaveBlake]

Krypton recognises COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR and PERFORMER (e.g PERFORMER = artistname(instrument)) tags when embedded in the FLAC files themselves, and you have a file per track.

In cuesheets much more limited range of information is supported, and as you point out treats PERFORMER entirely differently.

How do I tag a compilation album that has a different composer, conductor and other performers for each track?

You will need to rip each track into a separate FLAC file and tag each accordingly.

Out of interest why do you use single FLAC files cuesheets? I have ripped my music collection using EAC to separate FLAC files, it never crossed my mind to use cuesheets at all.

[graham-h]

Krypton recognises COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR and PERFORMER (e.g PERFORMER = artistname(instrument)) tags when embedded in the FLAC files themselves, and you have a file per track.

So it throws away these fields as soon as it recognises there is more than one track?

You will need to rip each track into a separate FLAC file and tag each accordingly.

Out of interest why do you use single FLAC files cuesheets? I have ripped my music collection using EAC to separate FLAC files, it never crossed my mind to use cuesheets at all.

When I started out ripping my CDs it seemed most people did that for classical music - you typically want to listen to the whole thing and one of the attractions of Kodi is that it handles embedded cuesheets well (unlike a well-known French media player, eg). You don't get any issues with movements which don't have gaps between them, it's less faff to make a copy of the original CD and I don't need a separate file sub-folder for each disc. Also, less work in Audacity when ripping from vinyl or tape.

It would be good if you could at least get Kodi to make sense of COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR etc in a multi-track FLAC containing, eg, a single concerto even if support for these tags in the track entries in cuesheets goes in the too difficult basket.

Many thanks for the quick reply.

[DaveBlake]

To be honest I have never looked closely at cuesheet implementation in Kodi. I don't really have a clear idea what it does with any embedded tags it may find in a single FLAC file for an album, nor what it should do. Apply them to every song?

What is the standard for cuesheets? Whatever Kodi does needs to be to some kind of common standard if possible. Find me some references perhaps for COMPOSER in cuesheets in other players?

Want the way Kodi handles this improved, then make is as easy for me as possible
I will add a note on my todo list, and I am going to edit the title of this thread to make it easier for me to find.

[graham-h]

What is the standard for cuesheets? Whatever Kodi does needs to be to some kind of common standard if possible. Find me some references perhaps for COMPOSER in cuesheets in other players?

Sadly, the 'standard' for cuesheets is not very comprehensive - they were never intended to carry loads of metadata, just the things that CD players might understand in CD-TEXT. The format originated with CDRWIN just for burning CDs. According to this tags supported in the cuesheet are only TITLE, PERFORMER and SONGWRITER but GENRE, COMPOSER and ARRANGER can be specified in a separate CD-TEXT file.

EAC writes tags it regards as non-standard (GENRE, DATE, DISCID and COMMENT) behind a REM tag, but it also writes the same tags to the FLAC so these are redundant. It writes PERFORMER to each track per the %artist% field but doesn't write SONGWRITER tags. I believe Foobar uses cuesheets as playlists but I've never tried it and it looks like they don't mess with the CDRWIN standard. Mp3tag doesn't write SONGWRITER tags either.

So I would say:
- all metadata which relates to the album as a whole should be read from the parent FLAC (as it is for single-track FLACs) and copied to each track entry in song_artist etc. with appropriate roles
- in the absence of this metadata in the FLAC, read it from the header of the cuesheet and copy to each track entry
- per track metadata to be read from the PERFORMER tag with support for artistname(role) format since nothing seems to write SONGWRITER tags. These data overwrite the above album-wide data.

BTW, is Kodi supposed to able to unravel strings like PERFORMER = "Mozart(Composer) / Solti(Conductor) / Berlin Phil.(Orchestra)" ? I couldn't get that to work although it does read multiple PERFORMER tags in the artist(role) format