[scott967]

1. Where is the new tag data being stored? I can't find it.
2. Any possibility of infolabels for these?

Thanks for your interest.

I am refering to the tag data in the music files themselves .The tags are standard to ID3 and Flac/Vorbis just Kodi has never processed them before. If you did not already set these tags, and you may not given Kodi didn't use them, then it is a matter of using a tag editor. Again I can give more info, just not sure what level to pitch my answer.

I will have a look at infolables. This was just a first step it what could be a long road. Tried to keep it as simple as possible for the devs to review, but it does mean it doesn't offer the user a great deal yet.

Yes, I understand the file tags. My question is in your test build I don't see the tag data being stored in the database, so I don't see how it is being used?

scott s.
.

[DaveBlake]

Yes, I understand the file tags. My question is in your test build I don't see the tag data being stored in the database, so I don't see how it is being used?

Right, gong to answer that in the application forum here because it is an implementation detail and I would like to continue discussion there, hope that is ok.

[zag]

Guess its not solved yet then

Just out of interest do you have some future plans for supporting this genre of music?

[DaveBlake]

Just out of interest do you have some future plans for supporting this genre of music?

Well my first priorty is to get the composer/conductor/orchestra work so far released, and also propagated to JSON so that the remote apps and web interfaces can use it too. Some music users (me for one) are going to play music with TV off, so JSON matters. There are possible some existing bugs in this area too that might distract me.

There is also adding to playlist rules so playlists can be created that use artist "role". Lots of practical consolidaton of the changes so far.

I think the next new step for classical music is to have a concept of "work" (TIT1 tag processing), so say users can select all the albums with Symphony no. 5, or the 1812 overture on. You can kind of do that now just using a search, but it is clunky.

But I am open to suggestions fellow music listeners.....

[LittleVince]

Hi DaveBlake,

Greetings from France! I've just registered on this forum to thank you for your work, as well as the other people contributing to this thread.

I'm new to Kodi and I really appreciate the work of the dev team, though everything went well until I rip some classical music albums... and everything go terribly wrong.

As you say, the composer/conductor/orchestra system would be a huge relief and a noticeable first step for better handling of these particular works.

I was wondering if there's any official or prefered tag for ensembles? (maybe BAND, ORCHESTRA, or ENSEMBLE?)

[DaveBlake]

...though everything went well until I rip some classical music albums... and everything go terribly wrong.

Yes my experience too. So here I am trying to improve things

I was wondering if there's any official or prefered tag for ensembles? (maybe BAND, ORCHESTRA, or ENSEMBLE?)

With FLAC (Vorbis comments) there is no official tag standards, but both BAND and ENSEMBLE have been discussed and used elsewhere. Never met "orchestra" so that would be an invention. I have coded to accept either BAND or ENSEMBLE, but would prefer ENSEMBLE, as that seems the most mentioned and kind of covers everything from a string quartet to a philharmonic

[LittleVince]

Thank you for this explanation. I agree with you: though English isn't my mothertongue, it seems to me that 'band' is often used to describe non-classical ensembles.

[DarkHelmet]

I have some classical music in my library. I tagged ensembles, conductors, guest musicians in the artist field divided by an "/" Example "Berliner Philharmoniker / Nigel Kennedy". If there is a unifying element in the album like an ensemble for example, I put that in the albumartist field. Composers are in the composers field. I did that basically for scraping reasons. The artists in the artist fields get scraped. A composer, special guest, conductor would not be scraped by kodi. I did the tagging manually through mp3tag. It is a kind of an okay-ish solution for me.

I follow the proposals for changes with great interest. In the thread in the dev forum evilhamster stated that the whole situation is a mess. To find out what kind of mess I downloaded a classical album from amazon today. I'd say amazon is a big enough player in the market, so that some users might have music bought and tagged through amazon on their drives. I wanted to see how the files are tagged and have a real user's life example of what will likely be thrown at kodi to "make the best out of it".

To be precise I bought and downloaded the album "The 100 Most Essential Pieces of Classical Music"

http://musicbrainz.org/release/b3c2329a-...5bcb406074

So here are the tags that came along with the files. I'll just give the tags of the first track. The principle is the same for the other files though:

Title: Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), K. 620: Overture
Artist: London Philharmonic Orchestra & David Parry
Album: The 99 Most Essential Pieces of Classical Music
Year: 2010
Track: 1/99
Genre: Classical
Comment: Amazon.com Song ID: 214547588
Albumartist: Various artists
CD-number: 1/1
Conductor: David Parry
Copyright: 2010 Telos

So far, so good or bad. However in some tracks the conductor tag is filled with "Johann Sebastian Bach" or "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart", "Mozart", "Chopin", "Ludwig van Beethoven", "Beethoven". So yeah, quite a mess indeed for a good database.

The composer field is empty for all files.

We have wrong tags, a barrier language (different names for the same piece in different languages, even the ensemble might have different names), typos, a separator "&" in the artist field that kodi can't handle properly, because this could also be just part of the name of a band (Florence & the machine for example).

It would be interesting to see if the files for that album come with other tags from itunes, Google Play and some more sources. I wouldn't be surprised if they come with other tags.

To sum it up, the task to make a valid database out of this mess is quite challenging. I can't imagine how this works without manually re-tagging the files. If kodi develops a guideline how to tag the files in the best way for kodi to handle, I think a lot has been achieved.

[Razze]

Have you tried tagging it with musicbrainz picard?
Should get these data
http://musicbrainz.org/release/b3c2329a-...5bcb406074

[DarkHelmet]

No I haven't. Should I for testing purposes? I was basically interested in the tags that come delivered with the files, because I believe that this is what a considerable number of users will have on their drives. Many users will NOT know or use Picard and I don't usually use it myself I have to admit.

[Razze]

No I haven't. Should I for testing purposes? I was basically interested in the tags that come delivered with the files, because I believe that this is what a considerable number of users will have on their drives. Many users will NOT know or use Picard and I don't usually use it myself I have to admit.

Well if amazon hands out bad data, it's going to be very very hard to make sense of it.
We can match and apply logic on it all we want but it will still be very likely that we end up with wrong data.

So basically, if your tags suck. Don't blame us :/

[DaveBlake]

To sum it up, the task to make a valid database out of this mess [from Amazon] is quite challenging. I can't imagine how this works without manually re-tagging the files. If kodi develops a guideline how to tag the files in the best way for kodi to handle, I think a lot has been achieved.

From your experiment we can't expect the tags on music purchased from Amazon to be much help. Since I source from CD I would not have known what comes with downloaded files, so thanks for trying. I also think you are right, some people will think music should come ready tagged correctly. But it doesn't, so a good wiki guide for setting up tag data for Kodi is as much as we can do.

Picard is one tool of many able to tag adequately and access Musicbrainz (which may or may not be up to the job for classical music). I use mp3tag, but there are others.

One day we may be able to unscramble poorly tagged files with a scraper, but for now at least Kodi can reward those that have tagged their music well to get full benefit or their efforts.

[DarkHelmet]

No I haven't. Should I for testing purposes? I was basically interested in the tags that come delivered with the files, because I believe that this is what a considerable number of users will have on their drives. Many users will NOT know or use Picard and I don't usually use it myself I have to admit.

Well if amazon hands out bad data, it's going to be very very hard to make sense of it.
We can match and apply logic on it all we want but it will still be very likely that we end up with wrong data.

So basically, if your tags suck. Don't blame us :/

Just so we're clear. I would consider myself a user who knows what kodi can do and can't. I know mp3tag well enough to manually fix my tags so that kodi can easily handle the tags. The question is, do average joe and the majority of users with classical music know that too and I doubt that they do. They will throw these tags as they are at kodi and expect a fairly good result.

What I've somehow wished for, would be that after automatic scraping is done, I'd get the chance to review the cases, where kodi faced unclear results or where kodi overwrites my data. Maybe present me suggestions so that I can pick which is the data I want.

[DaveBlake]

What I've somehow wished for, would be that after automatic scraping is done, I'd get the chance to review the cases, where kodi faced unclear results or where kodi overwrites my data. Maybe present me suggestions so that I can pick which is the data I want.

I agree, and I may get to it eventually, but my priority is getting Kodi using all the tag data first before worrying about scraping.

At the moment automatic scraping would not have done much for the library despite it being populated with good tag data. My experiences of scraping extra data from external sources for classical music is that it catches 1 in 5 albums correctly, 1 in 20 it misidentifies completely (screwing up artists) and the rest need manual intervention thus have to be scraped one album at a time. Oh and having done it all I get extra is record lable (which I may add to tagging anyway). Now my music sample may not be representive or big enough, but that was my user experience. Needs a better display of what possibilities it finds as well, to make picking manually useable e.g which of 10 items saying "Dvorak-Symphony no 9" is mine, turns out none of them but had to choose each one at a time and then remove that source and re-scan. An edit facility would be nice too, for all those it can not find or makes mistakes, some interface to NFO editing at least.

Job for life

[phool]

Very interesting developments here, glad to see the music side of Kodi is getting a little TLC.

While I don't have a classical music library, I was wondering if there would if there is any likelihood of implementing the ability to use custom tags? In Foobar2000 I am able to create custom tags (to distinguish albums from CD singles, Radioshows and live recordings) and present my library based on these custom tags.

It would be amazing if I could use these tags in Kodi as well but I'm not sure if this in the same scope as what is trying to be achieved here.