[DaveBlake]

Slightly off-topic even though music related. I have to admit that I took a look at what "the other software" aka Plex does ...

using Gracenote to identify tracks
fully integrating music videos (and even Vevo online videos) into the music library
creating playlists by similarity (probably like this addon does http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2108642 but fully integrated)
fixing misidentified artists inside Plex

sounds really sweet.

As I understand it the code is becoming more and more different from Kodi (and closed source) but might still be worth checking out.

Always interesting to keep an eye on other music player offerings, but not necessarily to follow.

Kodi has Musicbainz integration rather than pay for Gracenote (there is also some ethical history there too).
Yes we need to work on music videos, that is known.
There are some useful playlist improvements to be made too.

I know it my seem that feature requests just sit on a list forever, OK many do, but I do have hopes that these will get some attention. It is all a matter of enough hours in the day!

Fixing mis-identified artists is the one nearest to my current area of contributions. Whether I understand it or not I have to accept that (some) users find consistently tagging their music files difficult. On the one hand that is not Kodi's problem, Kodi is not a tagging tool there is plenty of other software for that. But on the other it is an issue, because when poorly tagged music makes a mess of the library users see that as Kodi. So, I think we need to take some more steps to help users with their tagging.

a) Better wiki guides (Zag has started that). User education could help a lot.

b) Some kind of tag consistency report. We currently bury scan errors in the debug log and wait for the user to spot funny things in the library. It would be possible to have a music library or music source files log, that just listed what tags have been scanned, great for spotting what tagging mistakes have been made. Would that have to be an addon (anyone like to do the Python), or can we do that as core?

c) Reject (don't try adding to library) music files where the number of musicbrainz ids doesn't match the number of artists. Kodi now processes the ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tag (thanks to Evilhamster) that fixes a bug in this area, but we still need users to use those tags correctly. I am beginning to think it would be better if Kodi simply skipped the messed up files rather than end up with duplicate artists with wrong IDs in the library.

Fixing messed up tags (without user input) is a tricky thing, just which bit is wrong. No idea what Plex does, but clearly telling the user which files they need to look, rather than just guessing, at has got to be a good start.

Enough work for a lifetime!