2021-05-03, 17:32
Hi there,
I am using Kodi 19 (Libreelec 9.95.2) with the "Use artist sortname when sorting by artist" option enabled. I have a large number of albums imported, only using the ID3-like tags present in the files (no online scraping). I actually manage my library with iTunes and only copy the files over to Kodi. All the files are *.m4a (AAC encoded). I guess iTunes uses its own tag format - Kid3, which I sometimes use for manual tagging, reports the tags not as ID3v2, but as mp4 tags.
In iTunes, you can set a "compilation" flag for each track. It seems that Kodi honours these flags and collects albums with the compilation flag set under the "Various Artists" artist (in my case it is localized to German, so the artist name is "Verschiedene Interpreten"). But this artist is not sorted properly when listing artists alphabetically. I would expect it under "V" (localized or not), but currently it shows up under "H".
The reason for that seems to be the following: especially for soundtrack albums, where an album mostly consists of tracks from one artist (the score) but has a single song from a different artist (the movie title song), I usually set an "album artist" (including the corresponding "sort album artist"), and I set this to the name of the main artist (i.e. the composer of the score). For example: the soundtrack to the movie Titanic has 14 tracks with track artist "James Horner" (sort artist: "Horner, James"), one track with track artist "Celine Dion" (sortartist: "Dion, Celine"), and all 15 tracks have the compilation flag set and have an album artist "James Horner" (sort album artist: "Horner, James").
It seems now that when the "Use artist sortname when sorting by artist" option is set, Kodi sets the sort artist for "Various Artists" to either the (track) sort artist or the album sort artist. Either way, in my case the sort artist for "Various Artists" is "Horner, James", hence it shows up under "H". This also affects applications using the Kodi API, in my case Yatse, where the sorting is wrong as well (I opened an issue there at first). Why this particular sort artist has been chosen I do not know, probably it was the first encountered by Kodi while reading the tags from the files.
I would consider this a bug - the automatically generated "Various Artists" artist should not be sorted by a sort artist provided in the tag. Or am I missing something here?
Thanks for any help or comments!
I am using Kodi 19 (Libreelec 9.95.2) with the "Use artist sortname when sorting by artist" option enabled. I have a large number of albums imported, only using the ID3-like tags present in the files (no online scraping). I actually manage my library with iTunes and only copy the files over to Kodi. All the files are *.m4a (AAC encoded). I guess iTunes uses its own tag format - Kid3, which I sometimes use for manual tagging, reports the tags not as ID3v2, but as mp4 tags.
In iTunes, you can set a "compilation" flag for each track. It seems that Kodi honours these flags and collects albums with the compilation flag set under the "Various Artists" artist (in my case it is localized to German, so the artist name is "Verschiedene Interpreten"). But this artist is not sorted properly when listing artists alphabetically. I would expect it under "V" (localized or not), but currently it shows up under "H".
The reason for that seems to be the following: especially for soundtrack albums, where an album mostly consists of tracks from one artist (the score) but has a single song from a different artist (the movie title song), I usually set an "album artist" (including the corresponding "sort album artist"), and I set this to the name of the main artist (i.e. the composer of the score). For example: the soundtrack to the movie Titanic has 14 tracks with track artist "James Horner" (sort artist: "Horner, James"), one track with track artist "Celine Dion" (sortartist: "Dion, Celine"), and all 15 tracks have the compilation flag set and have an album artist "James Horner" (sort album artist: "Horner, James").
It seems now that when the "Use artist sortname when sorting by artist" option is set, Kodi sets the sort artist for "Various Artists" to either the (track) sort artist or the album sort artist. Either way, in my case the sort artist for "Various Artists" is "Horner, James", hence it shows up under "H". This also affects applications using the Kodi API, in my case Yatse, where the sorting is wrong as well (I opened an issue there at first). Why this particular sort artist has been chosen I do not know, probably it was the first encountered by Kodi while reading the tags from the files.
I would consider this a bug - the automatically generated "Various Artists" artist should not be sorted by a sort artist provided in the tag. Or am I missing something here?
Thanks for any help or comments!
