[Canuma]

Sorry if this problem has been discusses elsewhere, i tried to search, but did't come up with anything usefull.
The Situation:
I have a Soundtrack Album which contains Tracks from a Video Game. Musicbrainz has it as a Various Artists Album.
Problem: When scanning that Album into DB, Kodi (Krypton RC 3) will add "Virtual Artists", Artists which are not within my Folder Structure. If it was just about Artwork, i would just add those missing Pictures manually, like i did with other compilations. However those Artists, beeing japanese, are getting indexed with their Hiragana Letters. Which makes it a) Hard to find, since i am not very familiar with Hiragana And b) it is actually not possible at all to find them, because there seems to be a problem showing those Hiragana chars at all (All i have is a blank entry with a picture, not sure though if this is a limitation of the Titan Skin i am using).

So i thought, I just add empty Folders for those Artists, containing a single artist.nfo where I manually replaced the name with latin letters, and a folder.jpg. No Albums or such. However, trying to scan that into my library, those Artists won't be added (I tried even Artists I don't have within my DB at all). I then tried to add shortcuts (Windows 7) to the corosponding Album, but no luck either.

So how (if) can one edit those virtual Artists in Kodis Music DB?

[DaveBlake]

No adding folders for those artists will not help. Kodi takes music library information from the tag internal to the music files, not the folder structure you happen to use.

You have tagged that soundtrack album using musicbrainz id tags, so I assume that the tagging software (Picard?) has included tags for the song artist name in Japenese and mbid. Kodi scans these tags and adds those artists to your library.

The lack of display may well be a limitation of the skin, but to be honest I am not sure if Hiragana display in Estuary either. Anyway you seem to want these names in latin script.

The only way to edit the artists names is to use tagging software to edit the ARTIST and ARTISTS tags in the music files. It may be possible to get Picard to give those artist tags in latin characters rather than Hiragana straight from Musicbrainz, otherwise you will have to do so manually taking care that you keeps the names (if more than one) in the same order as the mbid tags - these need to match up.

On the other hand perhaps you just don't want to see song artists, you can disable the "Show song and album artist" setting and reduce the number of artists that are displayed in the artist node.

At the moment Kodi can only scrape artist.nfo files and artwork for artists that have all their music under one unique folder - albums with muitiple album artists, or artists only on songs on albums by other artists or compilations can not succesfully be scraped from NFO. If they have an mbid, from tags, then artist info often can be scraped from online sources, and this could be used to overwrite the tag derrived name.

[Canuma]

No adding folders for those artists will not help. Kodi takes music library information from the tag internal to the music files, not the folder structure you happen to use.

Ah, for once i thought i can cheat with Kodi but.... Anyway, is there a reason why? Because in my Situation, it would even help in better organizing my Artwork, because i could simply add artwork to those folders instead of manually searching for those artworks.

The only way to edit the artists names is to use tagging software to edit the ARTIST and ARTISTS tags in the music files. It may be possible to get Picard to give those artist tags in latin characters rather than Hiragana straight from Musicbrainz, otherwise you will have to do so manually taking care that you keeps the names (if more than one) in the same order as the mbid tags - these need to match up.

I did that allready. However, the last time I tried to add that album, the information got rescraped. Thing is, i did not disable "prefer online informations" (or what it is called in english) in Kodi Settings. Now i had disabled it, because of .nfo Scrapping, finally also the local tags are prefered. Just as I wanted. Anyway, I don't know how Musicbrainz organizes their data. The better known Artist Kitaro for example is added in Hiragana as well, however when i scrape that artist, it will show up with latin chars.

On the other hand perhaps you just don't want to see song artists, you can disable the "Show song and album artist" setting and reduce the number of artists that are displayed in the artist node.

Ja, i read about that setting in the guideline. I have even considered that, because i have several albums with guest artists. However it seems that i can't find that option in Krypton. Here the scrapes are seperated for albums and artists, no "Show song and album artist" Option (or i missed that) Edit: Ah nevermind, found it. I mistakingly thought it is a scraper option. Not sure if i really like that though.

Yet, it is a start, thanks for helping out. Now i have to find a solution for my smartplaylist issues, but thats another story for another thread

[DaveBlake]

If you had 1000s of artists in your library you would understand why a folder per artist just so you can have artwork or load NFO is not the best idea. But the current design, needing all music in a unique artist folder, is too simplistic and needs changes. I hope in v18 to add the facilty to import additional info and art for an artist from a user specified location, including multiple artists covered by one file. The idea is to automate in a configuarable way, and to stop Kodi repeatedly rescraping data it already has.

Ah yes, having "Prefer online information" enabled is often a bad idea. My advice is always get the right information into the tags, and don't let anything mess with it. Scraping just the additional artist and album info is fine, but you don't want the names overwritten. Glad you seem to have what you wanted now.

[HomerJau]

Sounds good Dave. Please don't forget about a Music Video revamp too when redesigning 'music'.

[scott967]

Here is my suggestion:

1. You need a skin with a font that covers unicode "CJK" script characters (my experience is that such a font works with simplified and traditional Chinese, Hanji, Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul and Jamo). Kodi ships with a "system" font named arial.ttf which has this coverage and is an option in Estuary (could be used by other skins too).

2. There's no capability in Kodi (currently) for artist alias names. IME musicbrainz is inconsistent about using different scripts as the primary name (not helped that artists may or may not use their native scripts for their stage names).

3. My personal convention is to use what I consider artist primary name for the "artist" tag, regardless of what musicbrainz thinks. What this means is some times I have to manually edit the artist musicbrainz id (so that Kodi can find the artist in scraping). I then use "album artist" tag to include primary and alias names without using any musicbrainz album artist ids (this is important). The album artist primary name will be matched with the artist name (so doesn't cause any dupe in the database) and the "alias" will be added as a new artist (without musicbrainz id of course).

4. That works for most cases, except for the "various artists" case. Here, I add the primary and alias names as the artist tag (without musicbrainz artist ids). If I do need to have the musicbrainz artist id, in this case only I will use the "artists" tag in addition, but for this to work I have to use a "fake" musicbrainz artist id for the alias artist name.

5. You have to make sure "prefer online information" is UN-selected.

The main drawback of this is that Kodi won't find the artwork for the alias name artists, but if you use "folder.jpg" and "fanart.jpg" local art files in your folder structure (assuming /album artist/album/song files) you can open the info dialog for the alias artist and when you go to select the artwork Kodi will find the local art without having to actually browse your local folders. You have the same artwork for both the primary and alias artist names, but I don't have any problem with that. (As an aside it would be nice if there was a way to display "recently added artists" to make it easier to edit or find problems with newly added artists.)

scott s.
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