v17 Show song and album artists query
#1
Hi Dave and everyone else,

So in the usual attempt to ever improve my music library in Kodi V17 and decided to re-build from the start, Dave don't have how long it took as I just kept scanning day after day and never left it on as I find in Win10 with 17 that if you leave it on and come back to it it has either hung or is effectively broken in drawing the UI, so I just built when using Kodi.

After building it I still have over 12k artists from over 4k CDs and thought that V17 would be built better, but then I remembered this switch has changed in name and purpose from V16 so went and switched if off and know down to 1-2k artists which is perfect and what I want, so album artists only.

But it seems to have a secondary impact on the music library and it may possible be a bug, If I browse these artists and then select on to see their albums then I am only presented with their albums where they are album artist, not all albums? Personally I think this is incorrect, it is correct to change 'Artists' node to only display album artists, but once in Ablums shouldn't it display all the albums relevant to the artist regardless if album artist or artists on a compiliation?

For instance artist BT, I have 49 albums shown with switch active and 120 albums shown with switch in-active whereas I would have thought it should show all 120 regardless of the switch unless the switch is Kodi in General and not just 'artists' node?

Is there any workaround to get All albums @ album level when switch is active in V17? With the switch active I basically lose access to compilations via any specific artist and guess I can only access these albums from 'Various Artists' or whatever album artist is assigned to them?

Thanks,

Mike.
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#2
The "Show song and album artists" setting in V17 does exactly the same as the "Include artists who appear only on compilations" setting in V16, the only thing that has changed is the string for the setting name as it was felt the old name was confusing as it didn't really have anything specifically due to Compilations.

As for what you describe, I think that's by design so not a bug in my opinion, however whether it is by design or a bug then it's still a good question for what should be correct behaviour.
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#3
I'm not sure as I've not had time to play with all the fab stuff Dave has added for V17, but there's a number of playlist/node changes, so it maybe possible to do what you want with a custom node.
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#4
Mike the secondary behaviour of the "album artists only flag" is a design change - others asked for it, the behaviour got discussed on the forum (here in Music Corner somewhere), it made sense to me and so I did it. Unfortunately it sounds like a move that you don't want. Oh poo, I do feel like I am unlikely to please everyone.Confused

12k of song artists... I hope that you set the artist separators in advancedsettings.xml to help Kodi identify individual artists rather than have any "artist1 with artist2" artist entries in there. Perhaps sometime you can let me have your music db file (or an export if MySQL), would make interesting test data.

The node behaviour change is such that if you have an artists node with album artists only = true, either via the system setting or specifically for a custom node, then drilling down to see albums for a selected artist you will see those where they are the album artist. But you will not see those albums where they appear as a song artist on some tracks e.g. compilation albums or when they featured on a song. To see these as well you need to have album artists only = false when the artist was selected.

It does make sense to be able to filter the albums in much the same way as we do artists. Commonly people want to see the main albums by an artist, not all the "Now That's..." compilations or soundtrack albums they appear on, nor the albums by other people where they sing a duet etc.. But rather than add yet another option, a "main albums where they are album artist" flag, I decided to combine this facility into the album artist only flag. The album artist only flag now applies to both albums and artists nodes. This is a decision I am happy to review for v18.

You can do all kinds of things with smart playlists, but that won't give the navigation you want. Smart playlists apply the system "album artists only" flag. All I can offer in v17 is that there are "album artist" and "album & song artist" nodes tucked away under the Roles menu item on the Music Library menu. These do what they say explicity, rather than have to go off and change settings to see song artists.

Actually for v18 I want to open up the music navigation far more, give users whatever combination of navigation they want. For example say you are looking at just the albums where an artist is the album artist, the facility to immediately display the other albums too. Or from a song be able to see all the albums by that artist, or all the albums with the same genre etc.

So hang in with me and we'll get there.
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#5
Hi,

Thanks for the comments gents. Dave it's no biggie as for some reason I've never really used that switch in Kodi with music so it's always just been "show me everything" and I know you've done a lot of work with V17 that's why I decided to eventually dump my musicdb and do a complete rebuild so I could get my music db in a better state for what V17 has to offer.

I was just wondering if how it operates is how it should and it is and that is fine, I'm sure there are new methods to achieve what I want in V17 so I will start looking into them.

My db is on it's way to you so have fun and I don't believe I have anything in my advancesettings to help id artists, whoops!

I'm in for the long ride I think now with Kodi as a user, not sure as a skinner right now!, and always here to test stuff and help out with the music side as you know.

Regards,

Mike.
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#6
(2017-01-19, 10:56)Mike_Doc Wrote: My db is on it's way to you so have fun and I don't believe I have anything in my advancesettings to help id artists, whoops!
Lovely data. Smile
Posting here as others could he helped by it (although off topic, so it won't be obvious).

Mike adjusting the "artist separators" in advancedsettings.xml to match your tagging will allow Kodi to identify individual artists better. I noticed lots of "artist1/artist2" where you had not used space-slash-space the default separator in the tagging. Edit your advancedsettings.xml file to add to the musiclibrary section as follows:

Code:
</musiclibrary>
...
    <artistseparators>
    <separator> feat. </separator>
    <separator> Feat. </separator>
    <separator> ft. </separator>
    <separator> Ft. </separator>
    <separator> featuring </separator>               <!-- assuming " featuring "  never in artist name-->
    <separator> vs. </separator>
    <separator> vs </separator>
    <separator> Vs </separator>
    <separator>;</separator>
    <separator>/</separator>                  <!-- Don't do if you have AC/DC, but solves the slash no spaces  -->
    </artistseparators>
...
</musiclibrary>

This will unfortunately split "AC/DC", but you don't have that artist in your collection so it isn't a problem.

Then, sadly, you will need to force a full rescan (normal update will just see files unchanged and do nothing more). One way to do this in v17 is through a GUIsetting change - see sticky post - but if you keep restarting the scan then that won't work. Another is to drop the music source(s) and add it/them again. I am going to push for v18 to have a user facility to force full rescan, something others thought was unnecessary in v17, but clearly there is a need.

Also finding Kodi crashing when left on Win10 might have been fixed in RC4, at least some possible causes have been recently fixed.
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#7
Cheers Dave,

will apply it and probably drop source, clean library and then re-add source again to do full re-build. No AC/DC in mine. Only thing I really dislike in doing this is it messes up recently added, but if I need that sorted I just removed said files, clean, re-add and re-build, doesn't take long.
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#8
Recently added.... (and the playcounts of course).

"Recently added" is something else Kodi could do better, I have ranted elsewhere about it. At the moment we have either ids or file timesamps to work with, and neither is ideal. Ids change when you rescan, timetamp if you modify tags, so even when you have owned that music for years it shows up as something new. We need a true "added to my music collection" date, persistent beyond Kodi rebuilds, tag edits etc. If it irritates me enough no doubt I well find a fix eventually.

Having "/" as a separator is going to upset those web addresses you have as artist names - who knew, not just "AC/DC" but urls as artist!
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