[DaveBlake]

Tags have different names in different formats as I describe a few posts back
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2437945

For MP3 files the custom tag is called "MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM TYPE". Different tagging software deals with this in different ways, some like Picard give this tag their own internal name that you can use in all formats and it converts. But in Mp3Tag you need to you use the actual name appropriate for the format of music file (the same is true when adding other custom tags like musicbrainz ids in Mp3Tag).

In effect Musicbrainz are creating a new common standard for tagging above that defined by ID3 (Vorbis does not have a standard). Kodi is adopting to those tags too. The Picard tag documentation https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/mappings/ could help you see what that is.

[DaveBlake]

TESTERS WANTED

New test version of music improvements available here 8a21383 That is the windows link, but other platform versions are available. Or if you can complile yourself just pull the code from my Git repo.

I have reworked the SQL used, so it would be very helpful if people could try this out. Much as I would like to have this fix in v17, because other team members lack familairity with the music db schema they can not tell from looking at the code that this is correct. I am also fixing bugs that so far only I have noticed. So I need to be able to prove it works in practice before anything like it will be merged into master this late in the release cycle.

The testing required is to use the genre, artist and album nodes, and any custom nodes you may have created, and ensure that what gets found as you navigate makes sense to you. If you have custom nodes, then please try to unsure you also look at the default nodes that come with this build - your existsing menu structure will prevet this from being seen unless you copy the new structure into your userdata. Also, if you have suitably tagged music, to look at composers or conductors too.

And just to repeat it is good to use portable mode when testing initially.

Explanation of Changes (for those that really want to know)

1. The most noticeable change for users is that the albumartistsonly flag is now also used to determine what albums are shown for an artist. This has been requested before: say artistA has many albums, but features on a song or two by albums by other artists. When drilling down from artistA you used to see all these albums, now if albumartistsonly flag is enbled (either for that node in or via the system setting) you will only see those where artistA is the album artist. Looking at album artists only then what you get is just their albums; looking at song artists you get the lot just like before.
   
   
2. There were flaws in my initial implementation of the SQL to say get composers when the album artists only flag was set. This build sorts that all out. If trying to find say composers that are album artists too, you get those artists that composed a song and was the album artist for that song. Before the conditions were not tied together correctly.
   
   
3. Songs on the same album could have different genres, so this now has a similar tie of conditions when combining role (or album artist) and genre. Rather than fetch albums that have songs with composer X and songs with genre Y, it now fetches albums that have songs with both composer X and genre Y (same song).
   
   
4. Finally, it consistently uses just song genre for genre queries (as playlists rules do). Some options used to use album genre as well, which was always set to the song genre of the 1st song anyway. Although the album genre an be changed using NFO files or JSON, that change isn't saved in the album_genre table, so what gets displayed and what is used for matching selection criteria can differ. A rework of Genre is due in v18, but some consistency now makes sense.
   

[tkgafs]

Tried this out tonight, I haven't seen anything unexpected as of yet,

I have tried various genre searches, years, custom nodes for decades etc all seem to be correct

How do I turn on the albumartistsonly flag ? I cant find anything obvious in the music options.

I have some tracks with composer set but no idea how to search for them to check it works !!

I am using the default skin that came with your test version

[WelshPaul]

other platform versions are available

Sorry Dave, being a little stupid - does that mean if we're using Ubuntu we should just install the latest Linux nightly as we would normally or is there a separate version for the music improvements test?

[black_eagle]

Think you will have to build from source Paul. Daves tree is https://github.com/DaveTBlake/xbmc

[WelshPaul]

Thanks black_eagle. Time to learn a new Ubuntu skill !!

[DaveBlake]

On board already, many thanks guys

Unfortunately getting test builds working on other platforms is also where my knowledge runs out
If you look on the test builds mirror http://mirrors.kodi.tv/test-builds/ then there are builds of Music1020 for other platforms, but I don't know how you get the right one working on Unbuntu. Should be easier than building from source, maybe?

The code is here in my repo https://github.com/DaveTBlake/xbmc/tree/Music1120 if you really know how to start from scratch!!

How do I turn on the albumartistsonly flag ? I cant find anything obvious in the music options.

Sorry for my shorthand. To set the albumartistsonly flag system wide disable the "Show song and album artists" setting that is now found Settings>Media>Music. Then the artists node only shows album artists, and you get only albums by the selected artist, not the other albums where they just feature on a song.

Or you may have folder type custom nodes that use albumartistsonly as a path option.

Finally, assuming that you have the recent default menu structure (either because you have never created custom nodes, or because you have updated your local menu structure by copy from the most recent from the system folder), then under the Roles nodes there are now "album artists" and "Song & album artists" items. These let you flip easily between seeing just album artists, or the longer list of all song and album artists.

This all sounds more complexc then it really is!

[tkgafs]

Dave

Albumartistsonly seems to work correctly

Still dont see Roles anywhere or how to search for composers

Can you suggest the reasons for the following I have the album Juliet letters by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet tagged as in the following image



As I have set the Album Artist to Elvis Costello I would expect it to appear in his list of albums in the correct year orderunder his name but it does not it appears before all of his other albums as can be seen in the following image



I have checked and there does not appear to be any spaces preceding the artist or album artist tags

I'm guessing it may be something to do with "And The" in the artist tag as the album Painted by Memory by Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach and tagged in the same way does appear in the correct place in the album listing and appears with just Elvis costello as the artist name as I'd expect

[DaveBlake]

Still dont see Roles anywhere or how to search for composers

Did you install to a new location and run in portable mode (start from a shortcut with -p on the path)? If run normally (not portable) then it will pick up the userdata from previous versions, and if you have previously edited or customised your menu structure then new items won't appear. Maybe that is the issue?

Try running in portable mode.The music library (from the books icon towards top left of the main screen in Estuary) should look like this:



Click on "roles" node and you will see something like this:



But there will only be a composers node (or conductors, lyricists etc.) if some of your music has composer tags and you have scanned those tags with Kodi v17. In early betas rescanning was not forced, so unless you loaded the library from scratch the newly revelent tags would not have been picked up. If converting and old lib to the new version you may have created a v17 music db without the composers in it.

Does that help guide you towards composers? Do let me know.

Can you suggest the reasons for the following I have the album Juliet letters by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet tagged as in the following image...

I guess the surpize is that "Elvis Costello / Brodsky Quartet" is listed before "Elvis Costello". How we best deal with sorting collaborative albums with multiple album artists is an interesting question.

I can''t tell from those images, but are they also tagged with musicbrainz ids or have ARTISTS or ALBUMARTISTS tags? In Mp3tag bring up an extended tag list dialog (ctrl+T) for a song and share a screen shot of that.

It seems that Kodi split "Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet" into separate artists and recombined them with a "/". I also note ID3 v2.3 format tags. It could be a couple of things to do with the artist desc you see and the artist name used to sort no being quite the same. I need to know about the other tags, and do some experiments.

[tkgafs]

Dave,

Funny I thought about posting an extended tags image for the elvis costello issue but decided against it, but here it is now



Yes I deleted my music db then upgraded to v17 and rescanned a few weeks ago, but kept the settings and then last night installed your build

I'll completely uninstall remove the settings folder and re-install and let it scan the tracks overnight

Presumably this will show the roles / composers etc

PS. the elvis costello issue also occurs in Kodi V16

[tkgafs]

The scanning is much faster than v16 just scanned about 1600 albums into the library in about 90 minutes.

I can now see the roles and will check out if they appear correct

Four albums come up with an orchestra none of which I would expect, Mp3tag doesn't see an orchestra tag even in the extended tags, but as they are flac files could it be hiding somewhere Mp3tag doesn't display

[DaveBlake]

Four albums come up with an orchestra none of which I would expect, Mp3tag doesn't see an orchestra tag even in the extended tags, but as they are flac files could it be hiding somewhere Mp3tag doesn't display

For flac files Kodi will take anything in the BAND, ENSEMBLE tags or PERFORMER tag value of form "artistname(orchstra)" as an orchestra. Mp3tag will display all of these in the extended tag dialog.

[DaveBlake]

Funny I thought about posting an extended tags image for the elvis costello issue but decided against it, but here it is now...

PS. the elvis costello issue also occurs in Kodi V16

It is odd. Having mocked up some song files with the tags you show I am not able to repeat your experience. In particular if all of the tracks on "The Juliet Letters" are tagged just
ARTIST = "Elvis Costello and The Brodsky Quartet"
ALBUMARTIST = "Elvis Costello"
then I don't see how Kodi has the album artist as "Elvis Costello / Brodsky Quartet" as your image shows.

Have you added artist separators to the advancedsettings.xml?

Now I need to know what is happening! Can you provide your MyMusic60.db file for me to interrogate?

Or maybe if you are up to it do a separate install of v17 (just put it in c:/KodiTesting rather than program files and don't create icons, you can have as many installs of Kodi as you like) run in portable mode (add -p to the shortcut that you will need to create for it, and only add your Elivs Costello music as a source.

[tkgafs]

Dave,

I have sent you a PM with a link to MyMusic60.db and a zip of the offending album

I have not added anything to advancedsettings.xml as this is a brand new install after the uninstall of previous version and the removal of the userdata folder

i do note that you have used Elvis Costello and The Brodsky Quartet as the artist whereas I used Elvis Costello And The Brodsky Quartet cant imagine the case makes any difference but you never know

[DaveBlake]

Do you have NFO files for those albums, or "Prefer Online Information" setting enabled?

EDIT
Yes, you have an ablum.nfo
For once the story is not in the music file tags, but in the scraping. Scraping this NFO file has set album.strArtists to "Elvis Costello / Brodsky Quartet", and it is that field that is sorted and displayed (even though the underlying data still has the correct album artist relationship). I would delete this NFO, or edit it to have the album artist credits that match that in the tags

The fact that Kodi sorting of albums by artist name and year puts name with space "Elvis Costello " before "Elvis Costello" (no space) is a little odd. In comparison sorting artist by name does not. I will investigate that now