[Zapp!]

Hi!
I'm new to this forum and to Kodi in general and I'm still figuring out the right place for the issue I have - I hope I chose the right one

I'm trying to use Kodi as a headless music system most of the time and only connect it to my projector occasionally. I want to use Kore, the official iOS remote and the webinterface to control Kodi. This already works quite well, I only have one bigger issue right now:
I mainly add music to playlists by browsing the folders of my music collection. It is organised in multiple genre-folders, containing sub-folders for artists and albums or compilations. Most folders also contain a lot of single files that don't belong into a sub-folder.

The first thing I noticed when browsing my collection with one of the above mentioned remotes is the folder naming. A lot of them seem to get album names, even if they don't contain full albums.
One example:
I have a folder called 'Nina Simone', which contains several subfolders for albums, like '1965 - I Put A Spell On You'. The 'Nina Simone' folder also contains one single file called 'Nina Simone - Baltimore.mp3' (which is from the album 'Baltimore' and is tagged as such).

In the webinterface or Kore
'Nina Simone' is called 'Baltimore'
'1965 - I Put A Spell On You' is called 'I Put A Spell On You'
'Nina Simone - Baltimore.mp3' is called 'Baltimore'
The genre-folders (with usually lots of singe files and sub-folders) are called correctly.

Is there an option somewhere to only show the file and folder names as they are on disk? And is it possible to add whole folders to a playlist? This doesn't seem to possible either.
There is also a bug report for Kore from another user with the same problem: https://github.com/xbmc/Kore/issues/65
At first I thought this was a bug in Kore, too. I took me some time to realize that this seems to be a bug in Kodi itself.

I hope that somebody can help me with this.

Greetings
Zapp!

Edit: I forgot - I'm testing this with LibreELEC v7.90.009, Kodi v17.0-beta6

[DaveBlake]

There are two ways to use Kodi:

1) File view mode: you can just navigate your folder structure. But when you play something Kodi will scan the tags and use that information to display during playback.

2) Create a music library (from the tag data). Then you can navigate the genre, artist albym structure derrived from the tags or make smartplaylists etc.

It sound s like you are doing 1) and I would recommend 2), but I can't be sure from what you describe.

Kore will work in a similar way, providing access to the file structure, or the library created by Kodi.

But to be honest I don't really understand what you are doing in order to be able to help you any more.

[Zapp!]

Hi Dave,

thanks for your answer!

Yes, I'm trying to do 1)

My problem is that even in file view mode, the real folder- or filenames get replaced by metadata.

I think it's somehow in the way Files.GetDirectory of the Api works, but my coding skills are limited, so my attempts to change that failed.

Happy Holidays!

[jjd-uk]

Turn off tag reading in settings if you want a pure folder & filename view, location of this will be in Media settings -> Music

[Zapp!]

Hi jjd-uk,

this only seems to affect the Kodi GUI, not the file view mode of the remotes. However this would be the exact behavior I would like to see - just filenames, no tags.

Maybe there's a similar option for the data that's returned by the JSON-RPC API?

[Zapp!]

To illustrate the problem, I created this simple test folder:

Code:

KodiTest/
├── 01 FirstFolder
│   └── 01. I Put A Spell On You.mp3
├── 02 SecondFolder
│   └── 02. Tomorrow Is My Turn.mp3
├── 03 ThirdFolder
│   └── 01. Be My Husband.mp3
└── 04 FourthFolder
    └── 02. Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out.mp3

Each file is from a Nina Simone album.
The file- and foldernames are displayed correctly in Kodi itself.

Here is how the folder gets displayed in the iOS-Remote file browser:


And in Chorus2:

[DaveBlake]

AFAIK JSON API does pass out the filename and path data, but it is down to the app (Kore, iOS remote, Chorus etc.) what it displays. I think you need to ask them for support in the app specific forums. I am guessing their focus is primarily the library rather than a file view and they commonly take that approach, hence although it applies to various apps it is not a core Kodi issue.

[docwra]

Headless music servers should always use library mode in my opinion!