[frankvw]

If you just applied musicbrainz tags you're shit out of luck for the moment

Quite frankly, I'm not overly enthusiastic about MB in any case. From a technical standpoint I can see how it looked like a good idea at the time to have a comprehensive database that distinguishes between almost similar (and therefore easy to confuse) albums through unique IDs and to provide a strong implementation for it in Kodi. But MB itself leaves a lot to be desired. Firstly, from a user experience standpoint it is a pain to tag everything correctly since the MB user interface is about as friendly as an enraged Dobermann. And don't even get me started on the difficulty of finding an album in MB: in nine out of ten cases Google is the only way to find what you're looking for. And you have to, because more often than not Picard's lookup is so hit-and-miss that it's just about useless (especially when you're trying to re-tag MP3s that have been ripped years ago, as I've been trying to do) and you end up tagging the right album manually in your web browser. (Which, in all fairness, was a brilliant thing to implement in MB and Picard, because this feature essentially saves the day at the end.)

Secondly there's the fact that Kodi will use MB tags over the ones you can manually edit and that this is not optional. MB, being a user-populated database, is often incorrect and/or inconsistent. I have mentioned that already in another recent thread (on which Dave one again gave excellent advise, which I deeply appreciate) and outlined the problems of one album in a series being listed as having an album artist, another in the same series as being by "various artists" and that in order to edit that and have Kodi respond accordingly you can't leave the MB tags untouched. In other words, if I want to correct MBs inaccuracies in the Album Artist field especially, I need to either add the MB tag (which seems weird, because now the MB tag in my MP3 no longer corresponds with the MB tag in MB) or nuke the MB tag entirely (which seems a shame because team Kodi put a lot of hard work in providing a solid MB implementation).

Then why, I hear you say, don't I simply contribute something by correcting the MB entries? Good point. And I tried! But it's a pain when you have several hundred albums that need to be made consistent. Scripted tagging on your local music collection is a lot easier.

In short: in my opinion MB is a good idea that would be even greater if it were optional rather than enforced. At this point in time I'm very close to nuking all MB tags in my entire music library because to me they're more a pain than a boon. Which is a shame, because I can see all the work and passion and enthusiasm that has gone into their implementation and it pains me to have  to discard all that.

A checkbox somewhere in Kodi that would let me choose between MB-prioritized MP3 sorting and "traditional" human-readable tag sorting would give us the best of both worlds. Not sure if that would be easy to implement or not, but I'm just putting it out there anyway.

In closing, thanks to all team Kodi members for their hard work!!