[RonnieG3]

First, if this is in the wrong place, please feel free to move it, and if this has been asked before, forgive me. I don't even know where to look (and search didn't really help).

I'm just now focusing on perfecting my woefully inadequate music library. My question is hopefully a simple one:

I have my library right now sorted by Artist, then Album, then Track. The problem lies in soundtracks or compilation albums. Instead of having an artist listed with one (1) track on some rando album, I was wondering if it's possible (and if so how) for such tracks to be listed with the albums under the artist Various?

For example, I have Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) as my album, but it lists each track separately under the respective artist. Even if I set my tags to Album Artist - Various, track Artist - whoever, it still lists Hooked On A Feeling under the artist Blue Swede with the proper album (sometimes). I don't have .nfo files created because as far as I can tell there isn't a program yet that generates proper music .nfo files.

Can I have this album (along with other soundtracks, tribute albums, etc) listed under the artist Various and when the track plays it shows the artist? Any assistance you all can provide would be greatly appreciated . Thanks

[scott967]

First, you should read the music library (wiki) parts of the wiki a couple times to get an understanding of how things work.

Kodi uses music file metadata tags (tag data) to organize your music. The three most important tags are artist, album, and album artist. As the tag names suggest, album artist and album are closely related so you need to ensure consistency between the two. For things like soundtracks, when there isn't a specific album artist, Kodi will recognize this in a few different ways, but will "normalize" the album artist to "various artists" in your localized language. For convenience, I recommend that you use a music tagging software and assign "various artists" as the album artist yourself; this reduces the chance of Kodi getting it wrong.

In previous versions "various artists" wasn't displayed as an "artist" in the artist library view, but in Jarvis / 16.0 it now will show.

Kodi has a setting option to show "compilation artists". This mainly affects how the artist library view works. With compilation artists off, it will only show album artists. With it on it will show both album artists and song artists.

There's also an album library view that only shows compilation ("various artists") albums.

In your example, with setting "include artists who only appear on compilations" on, in the artist view you should see an artist of "various artists" and selecting that, the album "Guardians of the Galaxy" and selecting that, see all tracks of the album. You should also see the artist "Blue Swede" and selecting that again see the album "Guardians of the Galaxy", and selecting that, only see track 1 that is credited to Blue Swede.

Alternatively you could browse either the album library view or compilation library view, and find the album "Guardians of the Galaxy".

scott s.
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[RonnieG3]

Thanks scott. I appreciate it!