2016-05-20, 17:57
What is this
Please use this thread for both reporting and asking questions about the most recent changes to the way Kodi 17.0 Krypton processes the music file tags (ID3, APE2, Vorbis etc.) to create the music library and the associated new features.
If you are experiencing difficulties, or have questions, about released versions of Kodi then please create a separate thread.
As I hope you all know I have been working on improvements to the music library, slowly adding new features for release in Kodi 17.0 Krypton and fixing a few bugs. One big step has been the addition of the concept of artist roles, and I intend to bring together the various posts on that new feature in one place sometime soon. It is a little bit specialist, many users will not ever care about composers, DJ mixers or lyricists etc. (yet), and that is just fine. But there have also been a number of changes made to improve the way Kodi identifies individual artists from the music file tags, attempting to allow for some of the things that can go wrong with tagging, such as mismatching the number of Musicbrainz Ids to artist names. But also better accommodating music that is not tagged with Musicbrainz Ids, but has things like "artist1 feat. artist2".
What I'm looking for in this thread is for some brave volunteers to install the nightly build of Kodi 17 and test scanning their music collections. Then report back on how well (or not) Kodi behaved, any oddities or successes - both are useful feedback. It is important to know that there are no regressions in testing well tagged music file collections, but also to know that some of the less well tagged music files are being handled more robustly. I have obviously tested things with my own music collection, and with test data I have created specially, but none is as useful as real world testing "in the wild"
Other changes may mean that you want to re-tag some of your music files to take advantage of some of the new features in 17, but I would appreciate that you test with what you have first too. It is important to know what experiences a user upgrading Kodi versions will have.
Although intended as platform independant is also of interest to see how this performs on different platforms - I've only tested it on Windows. Some tests with MySQL databases would also be useful, although this is more relevent to other changes than the tag processing in particular.
Finally many thanks to those that have already tested some of these changes and provided essential feedback elsewhere. There is always more to be done, and I hope that having a common place to provide feedback will make the experience feel more easy, worthwhile (and maybe even fun?) for all of us.
What this isn't
A feature request thread. Please use the appropriate forum for that otherwise we all get lost.
Anything to do with Jarvis, Isengard or any older version of Kodi. I repeat - if you are experiencing difficulties, or have questions, about released versions of Kodi then please create a separate thread.
Download link
You can read about and download the development builds from here http://kodi.wiki/view/Development_builds
Beware these change just about every day, and different areas may be more or less stable. Always take backups of your system before you start. I also recommend protable mode as a way of having more than one version of Kodi installed at a time.
New Features Edited: March 2017
v17.1 is released, finally time to summarize what happened.
Artist Roles
Added artist roles feature roles to handle Composer, Conductor, DJMixer etc. Tags PR8015
Added processing for the following tags:
COMPOSER (TCOM)
CONDUCTOR (TPE3)
LYRICIST (TEXT)
REMIXER (TPE4)
ENSEMBLE / BAND / ORCHESTRA (TXXX:Ensemble)
ARRANGER *
ENGINEER *
PRODUCER *
DJMIXER *
MIXER *
PERFORMER=artist (instrument) (TIPL and TMCL)
* from the TIPL tag in ID3v2 which is in pairs of values e.g. "Mike Hatch", "Engineer"
But Kodi also processes the pairs of values in the PERFORMER (TMCL) tag, and any other TIPL entries, so role could be absolutely anything. Commonly it is used for instruments e.g. "Joe Fish", "Drummer", or "Yo Yo Ma", "Cello", but there is lots of diversity.
These tags are all about people (or groups of people) that contribute in some way to the recording as musicians or are in some other way involved. They are added to the music library as artists with a role. They can be listed separately from general artists (those scanned from the albumartist and artist tags) using custom nodes which can be configured to reflect the users interests. They will not be displayed on the original artist lists, so those not interested in this extra data will be uneffected.
Added a Roles node, similar to genre, that shows all the artist roles and navigates to the artists with that role
Currently there are default nodes for the standard roles, but users have to make custom nodes for the other roles they are interested in. Using custom nodes role filtering can be combined with genre e.g. a node for classical music composers, or pop music drummers. That is flexible and powerful, but hard work for new users. A simple node showing all roles that have been scanned into the library is a useful addition.
It creates a new content type of "roles", Estuary modified to display this, Confluence seems to just work.
A node file with
or alternatively
New default submenu and nodes for the standard roles
Album (Release) Type
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2561628
Please use this thread for both reporting and asking questions about the most recent changes to the way Kodi 17.0 Krypton processes the music file tags (ID3, APE2, Vorbis etc.) to create the music library and the associated new features.
If you are experiencing difficulties, or have questions, about released versions of Kodi then please create a separate thread.
As I hope you all know I have been working on improvements to the music library, slowly adding new features for release in Kodi 17.0 Krypton and fixing a few bugs. One big step has been the addition of the concept of artist roles, and I intend to bring together the various posts on that new feature in one place sometime soon. It is a little bit specialist, many users will not ever care about composers, DJ mixers or lyricists etc. (yet), and that is just fine. But there have also been a number of changes made to improve the way Kodi identifies individual artists from the music file tags, attempting to allow for some of the things that can go wrong with tagging, such as mismatching the number of Musicbrainz Ids to artist names. But also better accommodating music that is not tagged with Musicbrainz Ids, but has things like "artist1 feat. artist2".
What I'm looking for in this thread is for some brave volunteers to install the nightly build of Kodi 17 and test scanning their music collections. Then report back on how well (or not) Kodi behaved, any oddities or successes - both are useful feedback. It is important to know that there are no regressions in testing well tagged music file collections, but also to know that some of the less well tagged music files are being handled more robustly. I have obviously tested things with my own music collection, and with test data I have created specially, but none is as useful as real world testing "in the wild"
Other changes may mean that you want to re-tag some of your music files to take advantage of some of the new features in 17, but I would appreciate that you test with what you have first too. It is important to know what experiences a user upgrading Kodi versions will have.
Although intended as platform independant is also of interest to see how this performs on different platforms - I've only tested it on Windows. Some tests with MySQL databases would also be useful, although this is more relevent to other changes than the tag processing in particular.
Finally many thanks to those that have already tested some of these changes and provided essential feedback elsewhere. There is always more to be done, and I hope that having a common place to provide feedback will make the experience feel more easy, worthwhile (and maybe even fun?) for all of us.
What this isn't
A feature request thread. Please use the appropriate forum for that otherwise we all get lost.
Anything to do with Jarvis, Isengard or any older version of Kodi. I repeat - if you are experiencing difficulties, or have questions, about released versions of Kodi then please create a separate thread.
Download link
You can read about and download the development builds from here http://kodi.wiki/view/Development_builds
Beware these change just about every day, and different areas may be more or less stable. Always take backups of your system before you start. I also recommend protable mode as a way of having more than one version of Kodi installed at a time.
New Features Edited: March 2017
v17.1 is released, finally time to summarize what happened.
Artist Roles
Added artist roles feature roles to handle Composer, Conductor, DJMixer etc. Tags PR8015
Added processing for the following tags:
COMPOSER (TCOM)
CONDUCTOR (TPE3)
LYRICIST (TEXT)
REMIXER (TPE4)
ENSEMBLE / BAND / ORCHESTRA (TXXX:Ensemble)
ARRANGER *
ENGINEER *
PRODUCER *
DJMIXER *
MIXER *
PERFORMER=artist (instrument) (TIPL and TMCL)
* from the TIPL tag in ID3v2 which is in pairs of values e.g. "Mike Hatch", "Engineer"
But Kodi also processes the pairs of values in the PERFORMER (TMCL) tag, and any other TIPL entries, so role could be absolutely anything. Commonly it is used for instruments e.g. "Joe Fish", "Drummer", or "Yo Yo Ma", "Cello", but there is lots of diversity.
These tags are all about people (or groups of people) that contribute in some way to the recording as musicians or are in some other way involved. They are added to the music library as artists with a role. They can be listed separately from general artists (those scanned from the albumartist and artist tags) using custom nodes which can be configured to reflect the users interests. They will not be displayed on the original artist lists, so those not interested in this extra data will be uneffected.
Added a Roles node, similar to genre, that shows all the artist roles and navigates to the artists with that role
Currently there are default nodes for the standard roles, but users have to make custom nodes for the other roles they are interested in. Using custom nodes role filtering can be combined with genre e.g. a node for classical music composers, or pop music drummers. That is flexible and powerful, but hard work for new users. A simple node showing all roles that have been scanned into the library is a useful addition.
It creates a new content type of "roles", Estuary modified to display this, Confluence seems to just work.
A node file with
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<node order="1" type="filter" visible="Library.HasContent(Music)">
<label>Roles content</label>
<content>artists</content>
<group>roles</group>
</node>
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<node order="1" type="filter" visible="Library.HasContent(Music)">
<label>Roles Path</label>
<path>musicdb://roles</path>
</node>
New default submenu and nodes for the standard roles
- composer, conductor, orchestra, arranger, lyricist, DJmixer, remixer,
- all roles - standard roles, plus musician credits e.g. "piano", and people involved e.g. engineer
- all contributors - every artist that Kodi knows about regardless of role they contribute to the song
- all artists - song and album artists
- album artists only
Album (Release) Type
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2561628