Taking things in reverse because makes sense to me that way, and no not depressed at comments. I find other people's views interesting, we all experience things so differently and want different things. But no expectation I will agree or even if I do that I will be able to do anything about it.
Quote:Last but not least - would you recommend throwing 1Tb of mp3 files at Musicbrainz to have them 'cleaned' and ID'd ? If so, how? If not - how else?
If you are asking if I recommend you retag all your files using Picard or Mp3tag adding mbids, then if they are as carefully and accuractely tagged as you say, and if you have no artists with the same name, or albums (e.g. 3 copies of Beethoven's 5th Symphony), and if scrapers easily identify them for art work or if you don't care about that facility, I would say no there is no point. Could there be benefits in selectively retagging some e.g. all the Bee Gees tracks, or those that the scraper gets confused about, well maybe.
How big is your MyMusic52.db file? I repeat my offer to examine this and try to gain insight to the nature of why Kodi music library seems to behave so oddly for you.
Quote:Even with my hardware, Kodi fails big time handling such a big library if I choose 'Song' listing. ...
So something tells me that either I'm doing things the wrong way, or the Kodi core is simply not up to the task.
The slowness of songs node on big libraries is a known problem. Some team members just want to remove it rather than live with the embarrassing slowness, as fixng it requires a major redesign no one is in a position to implement. I think that removing the facility is an over reaction, and in the end there are sometimes reasons why list of all songs is useful no matter how slow.
But it is also that you are doing it wrong too, or at least the songs node is not the best choice. If you have a big library Kodi offers other efficient ways to access/browse your music. Approach Genre->artist->album->song, or create smart playlists or custom nodes using data based rules. I have used the genre tag extensively on my music collection to categorise my music is ways useful to me.
Quote:But still, I do have a number of comments about the default confluence Skin from an end user perspective that I find strange that have passed QC (?)
Well a new default skin for v17 onwards is about to be released called Estuary (Confuence will still be available through the repo). Perhaps it better to save your comments for that?
Quote:...produce an easily accessible and human readable log file. (maybe such a log file exist (?) I haven't figured out yet how to locate any of the Log files that mysteriously hide within the dark forests of Kodi)
Debug mode is turned on in settings. The resulting file is in userdata/kodi.log. There is wiki that tells you how in more detail, no dark forest.
Quote:I'd like to know how to easily add fanart and artist picture in a manual way. I have found countless number of entries in this forum asking the same, but to this day none of them ever received an answer (as far as I could tell).
If you mean completely manual with a local image, not selected from an online database, then you need to create an NFO file in the correct foler and the scrape from local. Otherwise you can scrape all artists/albums or just chosen ones. It is something that could be easier, but Kodi has lots of users and very few developers, so it could be some time before someone works on this.
Quote:The thing with Kodi is that right-clicking on a screen object produces a number of different actions, from nil to exit depending on the object. This is inconsistant and confusing. I mean this as constructive criticism.
The right click/context menu is intended to be only contextual actions only. The non-contextual actons on this menu are being remove in later versions. I guess this means in some ways it will become even less consistent, but the UI devs say this is "common sense".
Quote:What I seek is a simple way to choose how I wish Kodi should behave when scanning my library. Let me start clean by an initial scan based only on what I deliver; Namely my library! Warts and all. Nothing added, nothing deleted. Then I can selectively allow scraping, choosing scraper, scrape only a single album or a single artist or the entire library.
Yes Kodi can do that now.
Quote: Every time Kodi encounters a situation where something needs to be removed, altered or replaced, it should have an option to warn and let me decide, or at least produce an easily accessible and human readable log file.
Strictly without scraping nothing gets removed, altered or replaced. Interactive scraping could be tedious on a large library, it can take a while, but someone has just raised a PR for this, so maybe its times has come?
Quote:The property dialog of any object should be accessible by right-clicking on the object itself.
Artists, albums and songs all have an "infomation dialog" available from the context menu, just not called "properties". But possblly not the technical detail you want, and not editable.
Editing is complex. Kodi is not a tagging tool, there are plenty of good free applications for that. Want to change the tags use one of those. Then take album name, that is derrived from song file tags, edit the name do we not also change the song files? The data not derrived from tags is easier. At the moment to set specific vaules you have to use NFO files, and there are problems with muitple artists per album, and album sets etc. On screen editing would be nice.
I have picked thorugh your answer just to indicate where Kodi is at the moment, I think it can do more than you have found so far, it just does it in its own way. But thanks for the view point, and I will give some things some more thought. I agree with you on much of it.
But rather than turn this into a feature request thread I would like to get back to your original issue - why your tagging is not giving the library results that you expect. Would like to see that tagging (a screen shot or 2 from Picard?), and the MyMusic52.db could be revealing.
