[JanneT]

Hi folks,

I have a slight problem when scanning my albums. I have a lot of classical and jazz music, albums with multiple artists. To make it a little bit more complicated, I have tagged all my artists (Album Artists) with Last name, First name. I want to find Michael Brecker and Randy Brecker together under "B", not "M" and "R". This has worked well for some years now, except that the scrapers does not work. That I can understand.

Now, I added mbid's to the albums, and it still works in most cases. But in some cases the artists are filed in the "normal" way. For example "Puccini, Giacomo" is filed as Giacomo Puccini. There is not tag in the files for this album that contain the name Giacomo Puccini. If I remove all mbid tags it works as before.

So my question is: How are mbid's used when the music files are scanned?

[DaveBlake]

@JanneT I'm going to split this off into a nice thread of its own because it is about tagging and mbids

Firstly the name order thing. I also prefer to sort individual artists by surname so I understand where you are comming from. For v18 I am implementing the processing of ARTISTSORT, ALBUMARTISTSORT and COMPOSERSORT tags. There will be an option to use those values, if you have tagged with them, rather than name when sorting.

In the meantime setting name to "last name, first name" is the only way to get that ordering, and as you know the downside is that scraping by name will not identify the artists or albums correctly.

Now, I added mbid's to the albums, and it still works in most cases.

Yes the advantage is that would allow the scrapers to correctly identify albums and artists - if mbids are present then they are used by the scraper, otherwise it tries to use artist name and album title to get an ID from Musicbraiz and then use that for the other online data sources.

But in some cases the artists are filed in the "normal" way. For example "Puccini, Giacomo" is filed as Giacomo Puccini. There is not tag in the files for this album that contain the name Giacomo Puccini. If I remove all mbid tags it works as before.

Are you absolutely sure that "Giacomo Puccini" isn't in any tag of any music file? In ARTISTS, ALBUMARTISTS (note the "s") tags perhaps? That is the most obvious reason. Since it works when you remove them, then it is unlikely to be a COMPOSER or PERFORMER tag, but it is worth double checking those too.

How are mbid's used when the music files are scanned?

When processing the tags the first time an artist with both name and mbid tag is added the name in the ARTISTS tag or failing that in ARTIST is used. If Kodi encounters the same artist mbid later in the processing it does not change the name associated with it. Hence it only takes one file with the wrong name in a tag, and if that is the first encountered then that will be the name use.

But it also depends on your settings. If you have "Fetch additional information on update" enabled then you are both scanning tags and scraping additional information when you update the library. If you also have "Prefer online information" enabled then the information derrived from tags will be overwritten and the scraped artist name (for that mbid) will be applied. The "Giacomo Puccini" could be the result of succesfull scrapping.

The artist credits for an album found by thew album scraper are also used to add artists it doesn't already find. Hence if you are also scraping then it is possible that the album scraper is returning "Giacomo Puccini", and adding that as a new artist.

Bottom line, if it isn''t in the tags then ensure that you do not have "Prefer online information" enabled, or of course any artist.nfo files (although with multiple album artist albums that is less likely to be an issue).

Let me know how you get on.

[JanneT]

Firstly the name order thing. I also prefer to sort individual artists by surname so I understand where you are comming from. For v18 I am implementing the processing of ARTISTSORT, ALBUMARTISTSORT and COMPOSERSORT tags. There will be an option to use those values, if you have tagged with them, rather than name when sorting.

Wonderful! I think this is the way to go...

Are you absolutely sure that "Giacomo Puccini" isn't in any tag of any music file? In ARTISTS, ALBUMARTISTS (note the "s") tags perhaps? That is the most obvious reason. Since it works when you remove them, then it is unlikely to be a COMPOSER or PERFORMER tag, but it is worth double checking those too.

Will double check again. :-)

BTW, I have tried to find some information regarding ARTIST vs. ARTISTS and ALBUMARTIST vs. ALBUMARTISTS without success. It would be good to have the details to avoid any conflicts in the tags, and what tags to use and what tags to avoid.

When processing the tags the first time an artist with both name and mbid tag is added the name in the ARTISTS tag or failing that in ARTIST is used. If Kodi encounters the same artist mbid later in the processing it does not change the name associated with it. Hence it only takes one file with the wrong name in a tag, and if that is the first encountered then that will be the name use.

But it also depends on your settings. If you have "Fetch additional information on update" enabled then you are both scanning tags and scraping additional information when you update the library. If you also have "Prefer online information" enabled then the information derrived from tags will be overwritten and the scraped artist name (for that mbid) will be applied. The "Giacomo Puccini" could be the result of succesfull scrapping.

The artist credits for an album found by thew album scraper are also used to add artists it doesn't already find. Hence if you are also scraping then it is possible that the album scraper is returning "Giacomo Puccini", and adding that as a new artist.

Bottom line, if it isn''t in the tags then ensure that you do not have "Prefer online information" enabled, or of course any artist.nfo files (although with multiple album artist albums that is less likely to be an issue).

Let me know how you get on.

The problems I described occurs before scraping.

So if I have an ALBUM_ARTIST="Pachelbel, Johann / Vivaldi, Antonio / Albinoni, Tomaso / Händel, Georg Friedrich / Bach, Johann Sebastian", should I have an ARTISTS="Pachelbel, Johann / Vivaldi, Antonio / Albinoni, Tomaso / Händel, Georg Friedrich / Bach, Johann Sebastian" to get the proper binding?

In order to get the mbid's I had to add some albums and artists to Musicbrainz and it took some time to accomplish. Anyway, I have some "albums" I don't want to "pollute" Musicbrainz with. The artists may be known but not the albums. Is it possible to have the artist mbid but not the album mbid, and still be able to lookup the artist?

[DaveBlake]

So if I have an ALBUM_ARTIST="Pachelbel, Johann / Vivaldi, Antonio / Albinoni, Tomaso / Händel, Georg Friedrich / Bach, Johann Sebastian", should I have an ARTISTS="Pachelbel, Johann / Vivaldi, Antonio / Albinoni, Tomaso / Händel, Georg Friedrich / Bach, Johann Sebastian" to get the proper binding?

The purpose of ALBUMARTISTS and ARTISTS tags is to help match names to mbids when multiple names are in a single tag frame value (or the format only support single frames i.e. ID3 v2.3). If you use an item separator that Kodi can decode, like you do above, then strictly the ALBUMARTISTS tag isn't necessary. But if you had ALBUMARTIST="Johann Pachelbel and Antonio Vivaldi; orchestra, conductor", then you need an ALBUMARTISTS tag. More common is the ARTIST = "artist1 with artist2", and users wanting to see "exactly that when the track plays, hence ARTISTS = "artst1 / artist2" makes the names clear.

With your reordering names to last, first yes you either need to do the same with the releated ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tag, or if you use " / " as the separator you can delete the ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tags all together.

In order to get the mbid's I had to add some albums and artists to Musicbrainz and it took some time to accomplish. Anyway, I have some "albums" I don't want to "pollute" Musicbrainz with. The artists may be known but not the albums. Is it possible to have the artist mbid but not the album mbid, and still be able to lookup the artist?

I think you can get away with that, but really it is best to either use mbids or not. Having said that you, if you don't have an album mbid tag then Kodi processes the songs using album title and artist names to collect songs into albums, but it will still write the artist mbids to the database. Or at least I think it will, I haven't tested it.

[JanneT]

Are you absolutely sure that "Giacomo Puccini" isn't in any tag of any music file? In ARTISTS, ALBUMARTISTS (note the "s") tags perhaps? That is the most obvious reason. Since it works when you remove them, then it is unlikely to be a COMPOSER or PERFORMER tag, but it is worth double checking those too.

Yes, you were right! I finally found the problematic album. Then I realized what a mess my tags were. Lots of conflicting and redundant ALBUMARTIST, ALBUM ARTIST, ARTIST and ARTISTS tags. But at least I know how it happened. I have to be careful with Picard! I spent this morning to clean it up, and the scans perform as expected now.

Thanks!