My motivation for adding the entire extra tag reading and roles functionality to Kodi was so that I could separate the composers, conductors and orchestras for classical music. I hated seeing the artists list with them all mixed together because mostly I select what Classical music I want to hear by genre (=classical) and then composer, finally seeing a list of albums by that composer. I added a generic feature rather than one specific to my use as that is good design. It seems to me a good start, and something that could be deveolped further.
(2019-05-04, 00:16)scott967 Wrote: My only problem with "composer" role is I don't want "songwriters" included within "composers" (with no way to filter out). So my personal practice is to bastardize "performer" by using "songwriter" as a performer "instrument" which then shows up in Kodi as a "role".
Yes that composer list across all genres does end up with song writers etc., I get around that by ensuring that for my classical music COMPOSER is tagged carefully and then use a "Classical Composers" custom node that filters on genre as well as role.
Ironically, because I use Kodi with TV off, I don't get to use this custom node much. Instead I use SQL (although I could use artist NFO files, but find SQL easier) to put "Composer" in the instruments field of the artist table for those classical music artists that have role "composer". Then use Yatse which can filter artists on instruments (or style or mood) to show me just classcial composers.
(2019-05-04, 00:16)scott967 Wrote: What I would really like in "all contributors" node is some way to see in artist info all roles for an artist (and ideally, a way to directly see all library items grouped by role for the artist.) AFAIK there's no way to do that.
The only issue with fetching the roles for an artist as part of the artists node is not wanting to slow down that kind of node when most of the time users don't care about roles. It means making the data fetching/loading use specific i.e. only fetch what the skin is going to show, an approach that could be more efficient generally but is a big change from the original fetch it all into an item list approach.
As for grouping, again a whole new GUI feature - the facility to group things by some criteria. But what to do with library items that belong under more than one group e.g. artist is both composer and lyricist? List twice, or have a "Composer & Lyricist" section?
Nice ideas and I would certainly be interested in extending the use of this role/contributor data. New core GUI functionality needed to achieve it, sadly that middle part of GUI design lacks devs, and I'm not sure where to start. Since I don't use the music GUI most of the time probably I'm not the guy for the job, at least not on my own.
(2019-05-04, 00:16)scott967 Wrote: But I guess there is an issue as MB treats composers as having a dual-role of track and release artist in addition to composer role.
That is the thing, sometimes the composer is just the composer of the track, others they are also an artist, sometimes an album artist too and others just an album artist (not track).
(2019-05-04, 00:16)scott967 Wrote: Thinking about it some more, maybe a real problem is that the concept of "album artist" seems a bit sketchy to me. I mean, the "album artist" is really just a union of all track artists. I get that for commercial purposes certain artists will be listed on a physical medium and users might want to capture that, but I don't see that the concept of "album artist" adds any knowledge. Perhaps the "album artist" provides overall direction to the release as a value-added (or artistic) function and thus is its own role, but I suspect that's in a minority of cases.
As someone that almost always plays albums not songs, the concept of "album artist" is clear to me, and it is
not a union of track artists. For example I would not want to see all the song artists on a various artist compilation listed as the album artists, nor would I want to see artists that made guest appearances (song artists) listed as the album artist.
Album artist(s) plus album title identifies the album in a human way (unlike a Musicbrainz release group id), not just for commericial purposes. Many artists also create albums as a concept, not just a random collection of songs. It is how for many years I selected what physical medium to stick in the player, and still how I select what digital media I want to play.
Perhaps it seems "sketchy" to you because the use of album artist varies with music genre and user doing the tagging, even the MB guidelines vary (and are useful in what they advise). For example classical guitar albums you would tag the gutarist e.g. "Andre Segovia" as the album artist, but use the piece composer as the artist for each track. This results in an album artist that isn't also a song artist. But it makes sense on both browsing and playback - pick the album based on artist "Andre Segovia", or the song based on who composed it and see "Study No. 8, Tarrega" during playback.
Maybe we would not have that if composer and performer tagging had been standard from the beginning, but if as a minimum a media player is going to show album artist, song artist and title then you put the values in there that are useful as a human picking and listening to the music.