[AnalogKid]

And what is "best practice" for compilations/ soundtracks? What about single tracks that are not on any album?

Also, I would like to retain a year for each song and be able to search the library and see every song from say...1982. What is the best way to tag for this? Is it best to just do a filename search and put it in the file...ex. Soft Cell - Tainted Love (1982) ?

Or...should I make it Artist: Soft Cell, Title: Tainted Love, Year: 1982? Do I also need to put Albumartist= Soft Cell for singles (my current practice)?

B.

I would say that for compilations the best practice is like this:

\ACDC\
\ACDC\Back In Black\
\ACDC\Back In Back\01 - Back In Black.mp3


\Various Artists\
\Various Artists\Best Of The 80s\
\Various Artists\Best Of The 80s\01 - Relax.mp3


The key here is to tag your media with the ALBUMARTIST as 'Various Artists' but the individual track (relax.mp3) ARTIST tag by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
By doing this, you are correctly tagging the song artist using the ARTIST tag, and denoting that the overall ALBUMARTIST is by 'Various Artists'

Now - you can choose how you to name a compilation ( I use 'Various Artists', but you could choose 'Compilations' or any name you like, just as long as you are consistent with the naming convention.

If you want a specific designation for soundtracks, you could label the ALBUMARTIST as 'Soundtracks'.

This technical is arguably the best practice as it's easy to understand and implement via your tagging software, and it works well on the filesystem too.

If your tagging software also likes to organise your files based on the tags, please make sure it's using ALBUMARTIST in any folder structure and not ARTIST (very important!)

[1marc1]

Brian,

Did you ever get your "The Essential Bob Dylan" in the library with songs tagged by the year they were released, rather than 2010? If so, can you share what you did to make that work?

3) I am not opposed to doing additional scanning with Picard (but to elaborate more on the above answered by DaveBlake), when I have a greatest hits or best of album I don't care when that disc came out, for instance The Essential Bob Dylan is from 2010, but I put the individual years from the songs in the tags. I can then search for songs from 1965 and they will come up, correct? Can I use Picard or will it overwrite my song years on all these albums?

Thank you.

Marc.

[elee532]

Since there are many different ways to organize music, here is my simple guide which will guarantee to work with Kodi.

NOTE: Other methods will of course work, this is just a guide to "best practice"

File naming
C:\Music\Artistname\Albumname(year)\01-artist-track.mp3
C:\Music\Artistname\Albumname(year)\02-artist-track.mp3

So, for a re-released or re-mastered album, is the best practice to use year of the original album release year OR the year of the re-mastered album release?

Thanks!

[zag]

I use the re-release year personally, but this is set in tags anyway so kodi doesnt really care for the foldernames.

[Beercade]

Great work Zag. Those settings should work great for a normal album release, however other changes could be made for exceptions such as compilations, collaboration, songs with featured artists and singles. Ive come up with a system that has solved my issues with these albums and the associated artwork, again this worked for me and my OCD.

Compilations (albums that have "Various Artists" in the Album Artist field)

Compilation folder & file naming:
C:\Music\Various Artists\Albumname(year)\01-artist-track.mp3

Compilation tags:
'Albumartist' field must be 'Various Artists' for comps.
Verify that the compilations box is checked or enabled.
'Artist' field should be match the 'artists' field

Collaborations ie: Riding with The King (B.B. King & Eric Clapton)

Collaborations Musicbrainz Picard program settings;
Tags: use ID3v2 2.3 UTF-16
Options: join multiple ID3v2.3 tags with: <SPACE>/<SPACE>

Collaborations folder & file naming:
C:\Music\Artistname\Album\AlbumArtist-Album-01-Track.mp3
*NOTE for artwork to work properly you should have folders for both artists, put the collaboration album in one of the artists folder, not both, but choose an artist for whom no other albums exist as a first priority. This is for the reason of artwork showing properly in Artist view in Kodi.

Featured Artists ie: Feat.; Featuring; With; VS; WSG; ect.

Featured Artists Musicbrainz Picard program settings;
Tags: use ID3v2 2.3 UTF-16
Options: join multiple ID3v2.3 tags with: <SPACE>/<SPACE>

Singles (only one song from an album)

Singles folder and file naming
C:\Music\Singles\Artist-Track.mp3

Singles tags
Verify ‘Album’ tag should be blank or empty.
REF: https://kodi.tv/singles-support-in-the-music-library/

And lastly for you music purists out there:
OPTIONAL: If you want to use original album release date to fill the KODI date field. I.E. You want your Beatles collection to show in the in the 1960’s instead of when the CD came out in the 1980’s, add this script to Musicbrainz Picard.
Options->Options->Advanced: Scripting: $set(date,$left(%originaldate%,4))

[Brian B]

Brian,

Did you ever get your "The Essential Bob Dylan" in the library with songs tagged by the year they were released, rather than 2010? If so, can you share what you did to make that work?

3) I am not opposed to doing additional scanning with Picard (but to elaborate more on the above answered by DaveBlake), when I have a greatest hits or best of album I don't care when that disc came out, for instance The Essential Bob Dylan is from 2010, but I put the individual years from the songs in the tags. I can then search for songs from 1965 and they will come up, correct? Can I use Picard or will it overwrite my song years on all these albums?

Thank you.

Marc.

Well, it doesn't work in the way I'd like it to.

My process is:
1) rip using dbpoweramp
2) if problems, use EAC
3) tag using picard, but don't use graphics
4) use mp3tag for adding art and re-doing year manually

In kodi searching under year = doesn't work, i.e. songs don't show up
Under genre, i.e. Disco = no year option so doesn't work
Under song, sort by year = works but unwieldy due to song amount
Under album, select specific album = shows years for songs, so displays year correctly, but doesn't work in search

The Music Pump software I use on Android doesn't allow for searching by year, so I'm out of luck here too.

Using Kore you can go under songs list and do a search for a year by typing it in "1963" but then it doesn't work--all sorts of things pop up that aren't correct.

Kyra for Kodi (on iPad) only shows full albums in the year and not single or individual songs.

The solution that I know would work for me would be to add the year to the song title tag, but that seems like a pain and will clutter the display; however, that would enable simple searching by year.

Or, bite the bullet and learn how to use JRiver.

B.

[blossom24]

With reference to Posts 1 & 2 of this thread...

What is the Best Practice Guide for saving artwork (fanart/Posters/Thumbs) for artists appearing only in Compilation albums.

At the moment I am saving artwork in \Music\zz- ART directory. The only problem with this is that I then have to manually add the artwork to the artist via the info page.

How can I store them so a refresh of the (one hit) artist will pick up the artwork automatically.

[docwra]

Hmm thats a hard question to answer, I think artist images show up all over the kodi system if its downloaded once via a scraper.

Perhaps there is some way to scrape all the various artists and auto download images?

Basically i'm not sure

[blossom24]

That's the problem, there are no images for these one hit wonder artists in the usual scraper sources.

For example, MusicBrains, Fanart.TV etc don't have artwork (or any type of biography) for 1 Giant Leap, A Taste of Honey, Joolz Gianni, Katie Williams, Yvonne Elliman etc etc. So I am manually sourcing the images and manually adding them into a separate directory and then manually adding them as thumb and fanart for the listed artist.

Just wondering if there was another way to add manually sourced artwork for artists that only appear on compilation albums.

Also, some of these artists may have a Wikipedia page with a brief biography. How can I add that manually as the scraper source has no info at all. They are just listed as a name and recordings but no other personal details.

[docwra]

Also, some of these artists may have a Wikipedia page with a brief biography. How can I add that manually as the scraper source has no info at all. They are just listed as a name and recordings but no other personal details.

Personally I would upload artwork to the scraper source site so it works for everyone in the future. For example I just filled out Joolz Gianni and it works fine now. Just click the add button on the top menu to add new artists that are not already in the DB.

http://www.theaudiodb.com/artist/1_Giant_Leap
http://www.theaudiodb.com/artist/A_Taste_of_Honey
http://www.theaudiodb.com/artist/Joolz_Gianni

Sorry I don't know more about the manual Kodi method, I scrape all my data and regularly contribute to the metadata sites so everyone benefits.

[scott967]

I you use "Artist Slideshow" addon it can store files locally in its addon data. Then you can use "Artist Slideshow Helper" to move all the files to a folder where it creates artistname subfolders containing the images.

Alternatively you could create files named like "artistname-thumb.jpg, artistname-fanart.jpg" and put those alongside your media. In Kodi musicinfo dialog for artists there is an option to change thumb and fanart. That brings up Kodi file browser and for thumbs at least browsing in the file manager provides a "* item folder" entry that takes you right there. Unfortunately that entry isn't provided for fanart (no idea why not) so you have to traverse a folder tree to get to the right folder. I guess if you use a naming convention and dumped all the images in a single folder it might not be too hard to browse.

scott s.
.

[blossom24]

Personally I would upload artwork to the scraper source site so it works for everyone in the future. For example I just filled out Joolz Gianni and it works fine now. Just click the add button on the top menu to add new artists that are not already in the DB.

http://www.theaudiodb.com/artist/1_Giant_Leap
http://www.theaudiodb.com/artist/A_Taste_of_Honey
http://www.theaudiodb.com/artist/Joolz_Gianni

Sorry I don't know more about the manual Kodi method, I scrape all my data and regularly contribute to the metadata sites so everyone benefits.

Thanks docwra. I should share the images as I currently do for the Videos section.

I you use "Artist Slideshow" addon it can store files locally in its addon data. Then you can use "Artist Slideshow Helper" to move all the files to a folder where it creates artistname subfolders containing the images.

Alternatively you could create files named like "artistname-thumb.jpg, artistname-fanart.jpg" and put those alongside your media. In Kodi musicinfo dialog for artists there is an option to change thumb and fanart. That brings up Kodi file browser and for thumbs at least browsing in the file manager provides a "* item folder" entry that takes you right there. Unfortunately that entry isn't provided for fanart (no idea why not) so you have to traverse a folder tree to get to the right folder. I guess if you use a naming convention and dumped all the images in a single folder it might not be too hard to browse.

Thanks scott967. I'll look into the Artist Slideshow addon. Yes, that is how I have named my artwork, and that is how I am manually adding it via musicinfo page. Because there is no actual artist directory (it is a compilation) you don't get the "* Item Folder" and you have to rummage through the directory tree. I was just trying to get advice on a better way of doing it -- to store the artwork in a separate directory OR in with the compilation album OR some other place where KODI can just automatically find it via a refresh in the musicinfo dialogue page because the artwork has been named correctly.

The initial post in this thread just assumed there were no compilations in a collection.

[WildPhydeaux]

And lastly for you music purists out there:
OPTIONAL: If you want to use original album release date to fill the KODI date field. I.E. You want your Beatles collection to show in the in the 1960’s instead of when the CD came out in the 1980’s, add this script to Musicbrainz Picard.
Options->Options->Advanced: Scripting: $set(date,$left(%originaldate%,4))

Wow, exactly the information I wish I had had before I tagged a thousand albums with Picard!!!

I wonder if there's a way in Kodi to have it look at the Original Date tag instead of the Year tag when it scraps my music files. Hate it when I look in the Years view and see Shinin' On by Grand Funk listed in 2017 instead of 1974. Anyone know if this is readily accomplished?

Cheers,

RLW

[MauriceMedia]

Best practices?
Does this mean i would need to "rename" all my ripped files to

C:\Music\Artistname\Albumname(year)\01-artist-track.mp3
C:\Music\Artistname\Albumname(year)\02-artist-track.mp3

Wow, that is a lot of work...

[docwra]

Best practices?
Does this mean i would need to "rename" all my ripped files to

C:\Music\Artistname\Albumname(year)\01-artist-track.mp3
C:\Music\Artistname\Albumname(year)\02-artist-track.mp3

Wow, that is a lot of work...

No it does not. You can name your files anything you want really as long as they are tagged correctly.

That folder structure is just useful for storing local artwork.

As I said in the 1st post, this is "best practice" not "essential practice"