Musicbrainz integration in music library
#1
Hi Guys,

been reading through many threads dealing with the integration of musicbrainz to the music library and how correctly tagging (even more than before) music files is a must somehow.

Neither the Gotham FAQs http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBM...otham)_FAQ
nor the wiki section http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Add...he_library
provides any real insight about the musicbrainz integration.

As someone who uses xbmc primarily for music, I would really really greatly appreciate it if anyone could make a comprehensive list of any changes that were done to the music library.

After the Gotham update I had the following announcement "Music library needs to rescan tags from files. Would you like to scan now?"

After the scan I observed the following:

Top 100 songs and Top 100 albums were reverted to some quite old date
The "latest albums" were reset after the scan
I had multiple entries of the same album
I had multiple entries of an artist
I had duplicate entries of songs in an album
Compilations that were correctly identified as compilations in Frodo were no longer identified as compilations in Gotham

Those observations survived a clean up of the library as well (thought I could get rid of the duplicate entries that way).

I have about 30,000 songs in my library coming from various sources (ripped CDs, amazon music, google music, from friends) and in various album formats ("common" albums, many live bootlegs, handmade compilations). Frankly I have no idea if any of these have musicbrainz tags. I definitely can't rule it out. Personally I hadn't heard of musicbrainz before Gotham.

I have reverted back to Frodo for the time being.

So, could anyone please shed some light into the changes for a music lover?

In case logs of any kind are needed I'd happily provide them.

Thanks in advance, cheers Blush
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#2
Unfortunately the changes aren't very well documented as the 2 devs who primarily worked on this have had very little time.

Best source of information is probably contained in this thread http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=184514

From my understanding if you simply want Frodo behaviour back then make sure "Allow online data to override music tags" is disabled in the Music Library settings.
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#3
Wow, heavy stuff.

I guess the decision of integrating it has been done, so I'd still appreciate some rules for tagging my files and some "if, then" rules how they are handled.
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#4
I meant to start a thread with my own results, but here are some debug logs to show some details. Truthfully, I'm not even sure what is supposed to happen anymore.

Debug log 1: Log 1 XBMC Logs(Compilation flag = 1 in the tags if it matters) and "Override songs with online information" and "Download additional information during updates" enabled.
Result:
A$AP Rocky added as an artist in the artist view, and if you enable "Include artists who only appear in compilations" you get all the correct "featuring" artists listed as in the artist view as well.

Remove the folder, clean library

Debug log 2: Log 2 XBMC Logs (Compilation flag = 1 in the tag). Disabled "Override songs with online information" and "Download additional information during updates".
Result:
19 artists named A$AP Rocky in the artist view, no pictures (even though there is a folder.jpg in the artist directory).

Remove the folder, clean library

Debug log 3:Log 3 XBMC Logs ( Compilation flag = 1 in the tag). Enabled "Override songs with online information" and disabled "Download additional information during updates".
Result:
Same as debug log 1, A$AP Rocky and all the featuring artists are listed in the artist view, with their correct picture.

Remove the folder, clean library

Debug log 4: Log 4 XBMC Logs (Compilation flag = 1 in the tag). Disabled "Download additional information during updates" and enabled "Override songs with online information"
Result:
Same as debug log 2: 19 artists named A$AP Rocky in the artist view, no pictures (even though there is a folder.jpg in the artist directory).
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#5
That sounds completely correct to me. The songs no doubt have separate MBID and/or different names in the tags.

Basically, the MBID stuff is used to disambiguate. If you have two artists that should be the same but have different MBIDs then you'll get duplicates. Same with albums.

If you find problems it's 99% likely to be due to the MBIDs in the tags.

Musicbrainz seems to be a "use it for everything, trust it completely" or "don't use it at all" kinda thing. It's not really that useful in the odd case here or there unless you're very stringent with the tags (that means knowing what is actually in the file, not what your tagging app might be telling you). Few people fit in the second group.

Cheers,
Jonathan
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Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
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#6
jmarshall: so can you describe what is happening with debug log 2? Even the psuedo code will help me understand WHY it results in 19 artists with the "albumartist" tag.
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#7
Dear god, why was this enabled by default in Gotham? We should change it to off-by-default for a bug-fix version.

EDIT: Which is not to discredit the work that was done. It's awesome, and I like the feature, but it's a big change to default behavior. Or, keep it as default, but give better warning for those upgrading about what needs to be done. It's a bit too late now, so there's really no solution for Gotham, even in bug-fix versions. It seems like one of those things that is technically a great feature, but creates chaos when it meets average usage. Even if you blame the end-user for having weird tags, it doesn't change the unexpected chaos that most users will see.
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#8
Yes, we blame the user for having weird tags, just like we used to blame them if their albumartist tags were wrong, or they'd set the compilation flag wrong, or they'd...

The tags are God, and XBMC treats them as such. The only real solution to bad metadata is to fix the metadata.

Actual numbers that it causes issues for is quite small. Most folk have never heard of musicbrainz, don't have mp3 files with it in, and so don't have an issue.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


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#9
helta: I'm guessing without the files, but it's almost certainly due to different artists for those 19 songs. Different artists might be due to differing albumartist tags or differing MBIDs for those albumartists. The same applies to the song artists.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


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#10
I think I have my head wrapped around this better now and I'll try to update the wiki accordingly (the music library section of the wiki has long since needed some TLC in general). Awesome feature. Still not sure I would have enabled it by default, had it been up to me, but I like it a lot. I'd love to one day see an equivalent for TV shows (I'm always getting shows scanned in the day they air and sometimes summaries haven't been filled out yet, etc).

Is XBMC able to add MB tags when it rips a CD? Actually, does XBMC add any tags when it rips? I guess I'll need to hunt for my CD drive...
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#11
It doesn't add MBID tags, but can add normal tags (based on a freedb lookup).
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
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#12
(2014-05-12, 08:58)jmarshall Wrote: It doesn't add MBID tags, but can add normal tags (based on a freedb lookup).

CD-Rip tagging works wonderfully. The one thing I'd love to see added is the ability to embed album covert art.
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#13
So just thinking out loud here:

Code:
<musiclibrary>
    <itemseparator> / </itemseparator>    <!-- separator used for multiple artists/genres in tags. Note, this is *space* *slash* *space* -->
  </musiclibrary>

Am I right in thinking that if you had an Artist Tag of "PerformerA / PerformerB" they would both be scraped into the library as seperate entities in the Artist view?

By default, Picard does not do that. It uses "Feat" or whatever. But, in my case I purposely use a plugin to remove the featuring artists to the track title, leaving me with only 1 Artist in the Artist tag. In my above logs, this Artist is the same as the AlbumArtist tag. But, Picard does insert the MBID of all the featured artists of the track into seperate artist MBID tag's as well.

So in reference to debug log 2 posted above with the options "Override songs with online information" and "Download additional information during updates" disabled, it cannot reach out to Musicbrainz and ask about the other MBID's it finds. It then lists them as unique artists but all with the same name, I guess pulling from the Artist field. Is this the intended behavior?
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#14
Could anyone confirm the following?

If a musicbrainz artist id is found in a tag, xbmc will take this id as the correct artist assignment and ignore artist and albumartist in the tags.

Example:
Musicbrainz id 1223 (=The Beatles, just an example)
Artist tag: Madonna
Albumartist tag: Madonna
Album tag: Revolver

XBMC will recognize the artist as The Beatles and the album as Revolver, correct?

If an artist of the same name as identified by the musicbrainz id in the above file (The Beatles) is added, XBMC will not group that song of the same artist with the above artist if no musicbrainz id was found in that song.

Example:
Musicbrainz id not set in the tag
Artist tag: The Beatles
Albumartist tag: The Beatles
Album tag: Sgt. Pepper

XBMC will create another artist also named The Beatles with an album called Sgt. Pepper, correct?

If my assumption is correct, once an artist has been found with a musicbrainz id, XBMC will only then group other songs by that artist, if these songs also have the same musicbrainz artist id. Is that correct? So either tag ALL your songs with the musicbrainz id or tag NONE of your songs but never have some songs with a musicbrainz id and some without?
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#15
OK here is what happens. If there is proper format MBID tag for artist (maybe album artist too, haven't really sussed that out yet -- see note) You will see that when the MusicInfoScanner calls the UpdateDatabaseArtistInfo as a new thread. When you see

Code:
scraper: ResolveIDToUrl returned <url>http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/25b7b584-d952-4662-a8b9-dd8cdfbfeb64?inc=url-rels</url>

that is telling you that it found the artist mbid as 25b7b584-d952-4662-a8b9-dd8cdfbfeb64 and that will be used for scraping. If "override song" is set in the settings, it will replace whatever album artist name is in the database with whatever name MusicBrainz reports (note: I don't think this also updates the song artist name and this can cause dupes). If "override song" is not set it will retain whatever album artist name was found in the tag.

If you don't see that line in your log, then it will use the Frodo behavior of using the album artist name to query online for scraping.

I haven't done enough testing on "featured" artist to figure out what happens, and also I am weak on "compilations" but it may be that the scanner attempts to tie MBID to artist instead of album artist. In the case of multiples in a single file I think it tries to link first found artist to first found MBID etc. (I do my testing with APE tags on MP3 and Vorbis tags on FLAC which work the same way.) I avoid ID3 tags due to problems getting consistent recognition of multiples (such as consistent use of " / " separator).

scott s.
.

note: What I mean is all my testing I have done with APE tags MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID but there is also MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID or MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTIST (both allowed).
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