2017-05-23, 15:42
Have just chatted to @night199uk on IRC, one of the guys that implemented the original Musicbrainz integertaion in Kodi. His view was that the "Prefer online information" setting was really to allow Kodi to use the MBIDs from tags to accurately fetch all the other information, and regularly update it. Interesting to know.
Of course Musicbrainz entries change, artist credits get corrected along with other facts about the release, so I guess "Prefer online information" for music with MBID tags should mean album and song artist credits get replaced with the lastest data, that includes the artist name.
But trying to lookup on names alone, even album and artist combined, get MBIDs, and then modify the library changing the album to artist relationships and identities, is fraught. I question if it makes any sense to try and sort out a mix of stuff some with MBID and some without.
Maybe the solution is to say that changing artist credits (because "Prefer online information" is enabled, or controlled by some new setting), only happens for music with MBIDs drived from tags. If we have done a lookup using just name, and thus scraped the album and artist MBIDs then we can fetch other album and artist details e.g. dates, review, styles etc. and overwrite everything but the artist credits.
Proposal:
Replace "Prefer online information" setting with two new settings:
a) "Prefer album information from tags" - means take album genres, year, compilation and label from tags (not scraped from NFO or online sources). This is the only information other than albumartist credits we currently "overwrite". In the future artist genre could be added to this list, so maybe a better name to be found? But want to make it really clear info/tags are involved.
b) "Update artist credits for MBID tagged music" - indicates that artist credits for both album and songs, and the artist names, will be updated based on the MBID tags, ignoring what other tag values my say.
To go with b) we also need a facility to automatically re-scrape items with MBIDs from tags.
Currently only items with lastscraped = null get scraped automatically, so once something is scraped it can only be re-scraped one at a time from the refresh button on the info dialog. Of course it can also be automatically updated if the music file itself is altered in some way.
Of course Musicbrainz entries change, artist credits get corrected along with other facts about the release, so I guess "Prefer online information" for music with MBID tags should mean album and song artist credits get replaced with the lastest data, that includes the artist name.
But trying to lookup on names alone, even album and artist combined, get MBIDs, and then modify the library changing the album to artist relationships and identities, is fraught. I question if it makes any sense to try and sort out a mix of stuff some with MBID and some without.
Maybe the solution is to say that changing artist credits (because "Prefer online information" is enabled, or controlled by some new setting), only happens for music with MBIDs drived from tags. If we have done a lookup using just name, and thus scraped the album and artist MBIDs then we can fetch other album and artist details e.g. dates, review, styles etc. and overwrite everything but the artist credits.
Proposal:
Replace "Prefer online information" setting with two new settings:
a) "Prefer album information from tags" - means take album genres, year, compilation and label from tags (not scraped from NFO or online sources). This is the only information other than albumartist credits we currently "overwrite". In the future artist genre could be added to this list, so maybe a better name to be found? But want to make it really clear info/tags are involved.
b) "Update artist credits for MBID tagged music" - indicates that artist credits for both album and songs, and the artist names, will be updated based on the MBID tags, ignoring what other tag values my say.
To go with b) we also need a facility to automatically re-scrape items with MBIDs from tags.
Currently only items with lastscraped = null get scraped automatically, so once something is scraped it can only be re-scraped one at a time from the refresh button on the info dialog. Of course it can also be automatically updated if the music file itself is altered in some way.
