(2017-01-29, 01:15)beaker__ Wrote: I should finish processing my library with picard before whining further.
Consistant tagging is a good place to start to get a nice music library. But try to chill out a bit too. Kodi can do good things, but sometimes people start off on the wrong foot (no blame implied in any direction) and it turns into a drama. Treat it as an experiment, start small, and keep a sense of humor.
(2017-01-29, 01:15)beaker__ Wrote: Ok. The short is I nuked kodi. After a reinstall I came to accepted that Kodi prefers Music Brain's tags and/or online info, and unless I want to rebuild from, o I don't know, 2008 code then I need to work with it.
To be clear: if musicbrainz id tags are present then Kodi uses them, and expects that they are accurate and consistent. Earlier versions of Kodi did have some issues, v17 is better than v16 at over comming some tagging inconsistencies.
Why have mbid tags?
a) they are the only way to separate artists with the same name. Name is not unique e.g. John Williams composer of movie scores, and John Williams classical guitarist, and I think Musicbrainz as more than 23 different bands all called "Eclispse" etc.
b) it helps correctly identify artists and albums when scraping extra information and artwork from online sources. Again name is not enough, tag it with the mbid. It also makes scarping more efficient and reduces the chances of server lockout.
You do not have to have them, but they do have a use as long as they are accurate. Manual intervention, partially editing, is usually the reason they cause a problem. With v16 albums with multiple album artists, but no ALBUMARTISTS tag, can also give odd results.
While doing that big retagging with Picard, it would have been good to add
$setmulti(albumartists,%_albumartists%)
in the Picard tagger script (found under Options>Options>Advanced>Scripting) to ensure you have an ALBUMARTIST tag, sadly Picard does not do this by default yet.
Quote:A summary is:
duplicate, sometimes triplicate, album entries. ie., for one album who happens to be ./Music/Artist_Name/Album_Name/ and whos tracks are tagged with identical Artist and Album Names produce duplicate album entries. Navigate by file, not a problem, navigate by album is. Picard is reducing the number of duplicates but it is not 100%.
Just to be clear - you only have one copy of these music files? BTW Kodi does not use the folder path to identify album or artists just tags. You do not mention the ALBUMARTIST tag. Did all the tracks have the same, or any, Musicbrainz Album Id tag?
If you can share, via cloud, an example album with this issue then maybe I can spot the cause. Otherwise a full list of the tag values in each file would do, but users so often have difficulty doing that and data (often the multiple values) get omitted.
In addition to Picard, Mp3tag is a good tool for seeing all the tag values.
No nuking, or whining come to that, but I am happy to help you if you can give me more specific info.