2017-02-15, 12:54
The ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tags help Kodi identify individual artists involved with a song when they can not be easily deduced from the ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST tags. Formats like ID3 v2.3 are only single frame, hence an item separator is used to split combined values. In multiple frame tag formats e.g. ID3 v2.4 or Vorbis comments (Flac files) you can create separate values, or as for other formats use a single value with an item separator.
By default this separator is " / ", it can but can be changed to something else but it gets applied as a separator in many tags e.g. ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST, ARTISTS, ALBUMARTISTS, COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR and GENRE.
If you have used this separator in all your ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags there is no need for ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tags.
However the standard output from Picard does not do that. It gives ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags that look like:
Parsing in v17 is able to split some of these strings correctly, but parsing accurately is hard when you can have commas and other puctuation in artist names, so the best way to be sure Kodi gets it right is to add an ARTISTS or ALBUMARTISTS tag respectively.
It is particularly important if you tag with Musicbrainz IDs that Kodi can identify the same number of artists as it has id values. Picard adds an ARTISTS tag by default, but needs a script addition of $setmulti(albumartists,%_albumartists%) to give ALBUMARTISTS automatically.
To give a bit more flexibilty v17 will also apply multiple artist separator values. These are only applied to artist names, not to GENRE, ARTISTS or ALBUMARTISTS tags. These additional separators can be used to reduce the need for re-tagging if your music has not been tagged in the way that Kodi has previously needed. For example say you have artist tags "artist1 with artist2", but no ARTISTS tag and no Musicbrainz ID tags. If you know that no artists in your collection have " with " in their name then you can add " with " as an artist separator and Kodi will be able to identify "artist1" and "artist2" separately (rather than create yet another artist called "artist1 with artist2"). Or maybe you have used ";" as a separator in some music files.
At the moment this extra feature can only be set from the advancedsettings.xml, but in future versions it could be added to the settings GUI. Also v18 may have the facilty to use a variety of chars as separators in GENRE
By default this separator is " / ", it can but can be changed to something else but it gets applied as a separator in many tags e.g. ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST, ARTISTS, ALBUMARTISTS, COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR and GENRE.
If you have used this separator in all your ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags there is no need for ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tags.
However the standard output from Picard does not do that. It gives ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags that look like:
- "Georg Friedrich Händel; The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock"
- "artist1 feat. artist2"
- "artist1 & artist2 (featuring artist3)"
Parsing in v17 is able to split some of these strings correctly, but parsing accurately is hard when you can have commas and other puctuation in artist names, so the best way to be sure Kodi gets it right is to add an ARTISTS or ALBUMARTISTS tag respectively.
It is particularly important if you tag with Musicbrainz IDs that Kodi can identify the same number of artists as it has id values. Picard adds an ARTISTS tag by default, but needs a script addition of $setmulti(albumartists,%_albumartists%) to give ALBUMARTISTS automatically.
To give a bit more flexibilty v17 will also apply multiple artist separator values. These are only applied to artist names, not to GENRE, ARTISTS or ALBUMARTISTS tags. These additional separators can be used to reduce the need for re-tagging if your music has not been tagged in the way that Kodi has previously needed. For example say you have artist tags "artist1 with artist2", but no ARTISTS tag and no Musicbrainz ID tags. If you know that no artists in your collection have " with " in their name then you can add " with " as an artist separator and Kodi will be able to identify "artist1" and "artist2" separately (rather than create yet another artist called "artist1 with artist2"). Or maybe you have used ";" as a separator in some music files.
At the moment this extra feature can only be set from the advancedsettings.xml, but in future versions it could be added to the settings GUI. Also v18 may have the facilty to use a variety of chars as separators in GENRE
