2015-12-31, 13:03
When users scan their music files into the library, I would like to get Kodi to give users feedback on the quality of tagging. Poorly or inconsistently tagged files quietly either fail completely or make a mess, or sometimes the library results are just unexpected. For the user it just makes Kodi look bad. Much better if we could at least give the user a hint where they have messed up. The same thing could apply to video if tagging takes off there too.
The sort of tag integrity we can check and report back is things like:
a) mis-match of number of artist names to number of musicbrainz ID
b) Having artist musicbrainz ID but not track or album
In a perfect world the file tags would be perfect, but of course they aren't even after using tools that lookup external databases. Even expert users can get in a mess on occassions.
So where can this feedback go?
1) The debug log. This seems obvious as we are reporting "glitches" in the tagging, and it is already available. But downsides:
At the moment we do log here when files have tags that Kodi doesn't recognise, but not sure how helpful that is or if anyone ever looks at it. Mostly it is just standard tags that Kodi doesn't process and hasn't got code to skip.
2) The event log. Not really sure what this is for, but Razze suggested in another thread that it could be used for this. It is visible from within Kodi, and so far uncluttered (mine only has one entry). But can you save it, to share with support or check later?
3) Something else? I don't really want to create another logging facility with all that entails, or is it trivial? Pausing the scan with a warning message just isnt Kodi. Alternatives?
Really like some design input here from the rest of the team or interested users.
The sort of tag integrity we can check and report back is things like:
a) mis-match of number of artist names to number of musicbrainz ID
b) Having artist musicbrainz ID but not track or album
In a perfect world the file tags would be perfect, but of course they aren't even after using tools that lookup external databases. Even expert users can get in a mess on occassions.
So where can this feedback go?
1) The debug log. This seems obvious as we are reporting "glitches" in the tagging, and it is already available. But downsides:
- Have to have debug on during scan, not default use.
- Report mixed in with lots of other debug output meaningless to many users.
- Not readily visible from Kodi (viewing log from RPi etc. is a right faff)
- It is tempoary, content replaced next time you restart, so eariler scanning incidents are lost
At the moment we do log here when files have tags that Kodi doesn't recognise, but not sure how helpful that is or if anyone ever looks at it. Mostly it is just standard tags that Kodi doesn't process and hasn't got code to skip.
2) The event log. Not really sure what this is for, but Razze suggested in another thread that it could be used for this. It is visible from within Kodi, and so far uncluttered (mine only has one entry). But can you save it, to share with support or check later?
3) Something else? I don't really want to create another logging facility with all that entails, or is it trivial? Pausing the scan with a warning message just isnt Kodi. Alternatives?
Really like some design input here from the rest of the team or interested users.