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Tolriq no marquerade here, and I would not block any PRs by you or anyone else. You are too quick to think the worst of me and it is very wearing. Pehaps I had best add that I have been unwell, so incapacitated I have not been online at all until now hence the silence, least you see that as some ploy.
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Powerhouse and @
black_eagle thanking for joining our debate even if you don't agree with me. No real way to know how representative anyone's views are, all I can say it that the desire for missing artist tags to be separated from everything else was not the way I wanted to go.
I guess it comes down to how you see missing artists. If they are a mistake that the user wants to be made aware of, then I will concede that having them separated from those actualy tagged as "unknown" makes some sense. With that I presume the display of "missing artist" in
all places - song and album nodes as the artist name, as well as the artists node - is desirable.
But I'm just not sure users want to fix their tags, present company excepted, many just want Kodi to magically repair any messes. I read the distress that Kodi behaving accurately but inflexibly causes users. I really just want to lead to a happy Kodi user experience.
Another view is that no artist tag could be deliberate, and that the artist has perhaps been included in the song title (silly but historically possible). In that case display of "missing artist", in all but the artists node, would just be obtrusive. That there would be people saying they left artist blank and did not want some other extra text being displayed when the song was listed or playing.
Now adding an invented artist is one thing, but having to hide is from users sometimes would be fiddly and something I wanted to avoid. Can we say no artists are mandatory, and if the artist tag is missing Kodi will show "missing artist" as if that was the name provided?
Oh yes "missing artist" could be any text, from language setting or advanced setting xml (use configurable). Written to and retrieved from the artist table to save silly juggling getting the artist name to display on the UI etc.
Then the API...
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Tolriq you have said much, and I have read it, but I still can not tell how you actually want the API to provide info on invented artists. I made a number of suggestions, but never got related feedback. If one of the artists in the database is actually an invented "missing artist", what does the API do? Even if I am not implementing it someone else might like to know.