Classical music (composer, year)
#1
I would now like to look into some problems with I have with my music collection (classical music). First, I want to emphasize that kodi does a great job and I really like to use it. I very much appreciate the roles concept.

The problem I will describe [with my very limited English] occurs in many cases, but my concrete example is the "Orchestral works" collection from G.F. Handel (click). To every track, I add the tag "composer", which is "Georg Friedrich Händel". I would now expect that there is one (!) entry under roles -> composers with that name. In fact, there are two entries: One is "Georg Friedrich Händel" and one is "Georg Friedrich Händel; The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock". The first entry is correct. But the latter is a different tag: album artist. Why does this appear unter roles -> composers?

There is one additional problem. It is a cd collection with six discs. I guess they where published some time ago as individual publications. So MusicBrainz put individual publication dates to these discs. I should have corrected them to the release date of the box set, I guess. Now, I don't have one (!) album "Orchestral works" but six albums "Orchestral works". Four of them are listed under the conductor "Georg Friedrich Händel" and two of them are listed under "Georg Friedrich Händel; The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock".

What I would like to have is one (!) conductor "Georg Friedrich Händel". I don't know where the other conductor entry comes from and I think this could be a bug (but that's just a guess Wink ). And I would like to have one (!) album "Orchestral works" which consists of course of six discs. I don't know if I can tell kodi somehow to ignore the publication dates or if I have to merge them to one date.

I hope that I made the problem(s) clear. What do you think about it?

Thanks a lot
Martin
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#2
You are seeing "Georg Friedrich Händel; The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock" as a composer. This will be from how the music is tagged. From what you have said I can guess what has happened, so I hope I can explain it clearly enough.

To help Kodi decode album artist = "Georg Friedrich Händel; The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock" into "Georg Friedrich Händel", "The English Concert" and "Trevor Pinnock" an ALBUMARTISTS (note the "S") is needed with value "Georg Friedrich Händel / The English Concert / Trevor Pinnock" (or separate frames if a multi-frame tag format). Unfortunately Picard does not add this by default, you need to make a change to the settings.

In Picard under Options>Options>Advanced>Scripting add the line
$setmulti(albumartists,%_albumartists%)
This will create ALBUMARTISTS tags when you tag your music.

What you are seeing is that sometimes Kodi can deduce from other data how to separate these artists, but for those 2 albums it could not. Adding an ALBUMARTISTS tag ensures it can do this correctly every time.

Edit the tags and rescan into the library.

Quote:There is one additional problem. It is a cd collection with six discs. I guess they where published some time ago as individual publications. So MusicBrainz put individual publication dates to these discs. I should have corrected them to the release date of the box set, I guess. Now, I don't have one (!) album "Orchestral works" but six albums "Orchestral works". Four of them are listed under the conductor "Georg Friedrich Händel" and two of them are listed under "Georg Friedrich Händel; The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock".
As you have tagged using 6 separate releases form Musicbrainz you will see 6 separate albums. Just editing the dates would not change this, they have individual mbids and Kodi will see that as separate albums. The solution here is to make a submission to Musicbrainz for the box set as a release, connecting it to the recordings they already have, then tag your set with that release.

Happy tagging Smile
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#3
Thanks a lot, David.

Hmm, so I always need ALBUMARTISTS, which consists exactly of the names from ALBUMARTIST, seperated by "/"?

I only use MusicBrainz for the initial tagging. What I could do then is remove all tags which I don't need (and also the mbid). A quick test shows that then the multiple albums merge into one, just like I want...
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#4
(2017-02-10, 12:46)beedaddy Wrote: Hmm, so I always need ALBUMARTISTS, which consists exactly of the names from ALBUMARTIST, seperated by "/"?
When there are multiple album artists, and the names are not separated by artists separators (since "," is sometimes part of a name and sometimes not Kodi can not assume it is a separator) then yes. Historically the separator is space-slash-space by default, but you can tell Kodi to use a variety of different separators for artists including ";", or " feat. " etc.

Quote:I only use MusicBrainz for the initial tagging. What I could do then is remove all tags which I don't need (and also the mbid). A quick test shows that then the multiple albums merge into one, just like I want...
Contrbuting to the community by adding the set to Musicbrainz is better. Having Muiscbrainz id will improve the accuracy and efficiency of any subsequent scraping of additional info.

Of course you can remove or edit them, it is your music file, but you need to do so with care. If mbid tags are there Kodi will attempt to use them, partial tagging or inconsistent matching of names to mbids can cause a mess. I will get grumpy if you later come back with such self inflicted a problem! But my own music collection has a mixture, some files tagged with mbids others not. I started without, but I am slowly adding them.
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#5
DaveBlake Wrote:Contrbuting to the community by adding the set to Musicbrainz is better. Having Muiscbrainz id will improve the accuracy and efficiency of any subsequent scraping of additional info.
Yes, of course that would the best and less selfish. I never understood how to do that exactly, but I should definitely do that.
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#6
It is not too hard. It took me a while to get around to contributing to MB too, but in the end we all gain and a few additions now and then isn't too onerous a task. I know that tagging can seem to take forever to get right, but a good library does bring rewards.
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#7
(2017-02-10, 13:01)DaveBlake Wrote: When there are multiple album artists, and the names are not separated by artists separators (since "," is sometimes part of a name and sometimes not Kodi can not assume it is a separator) then yes. Historically the separator is space-slash-space by default, but you can tell Kodi to use a variety of different separators for artists including ";", or " feat. " etc.

Dave, can you clarify, please. Use of ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS seems to be undocumented. Extensive tests on an mp3 file and digging into some of the source code gave me this:
ALBUMARTIST "Bristol Bach Choir|Nigel Nash" creates two artists (ie no need for ALBUMARTISTS)
ARTIST "Bristol Bach Choir|Nigel Nash" creates two artists (ie no need for ARTISTS)
ALBUMARTISTS "Bristol Bach Choir|Nigel Nash" does not split the two artists - the only separator which works is " / ". Same for ARTISTS. It seems ALBUMARTISTS, ARTISTS relates to m_musicItemSeparator, not m_musicArtistSeparators (AdvancedSettings.cpp line 283 or thereabouts). The same applies to GENREs and other stuff - the separator is not customisable(?)

So why exactly are ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS needed?
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#8
The ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tags help Kodi identify individual artists involved with a song when they can not be easily deduced from the ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST tags. Formats like ID3 v2.3 are only single frame, hence an item separator is used to split combined values. In multiple frame tag formats e.g. ID3 v2.4 or Vorbis comments (Flac files) you can create separate values, or as for other formats use a single value with an item separator.

By default this separator is " / ", it can but can be changed to something else but it gets applied as a separator in many tags e.g. ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST, ARTISTS, ALBUMARTISTS, COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR and GENRE.

If you have used this separator in all your ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags there is no need for ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tags.
However the standard output from Picard does not do that. It gives ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags that look like:
  • "Georg Friedrich Händel; The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock"
  • "artist1 feat. artist2"
  • "artist1 & artist2 (featuring artist3)"
Moreover some users also like to have "artist1 & artist2 (featuring artist3)" displayed on the playlists etc., not "artist1 / artist2 / artist3", some want the tag without " / ", or have it tagged differently for some other player.

Parsing in v17 is able to split some of these strings correctly, but parsing accurately is hard when you can have commas and other puctuation in artist names, so the best way to be sure Kodi gets it right is to add an ARTISTS or ALBUMARTISTS tag respectively.

It is particularly important if you tag with Musicbrainz IDs that Kodi can identify the same number of artists as it has id values. Picard adds an ARTISTS tag by default, but needs a script addition of $setmulti(albumartists,%_albumartists%) to give ALBUMARTISTS automatically.

To give a bit more flexibilty v17 will also apply multiple artist separator values. These are only applied to artist names, not to GENRE, ARTISTS or ALBUMARTISTS tags. These additional separators can be used to reduce the need for re-tagging if your music has not been tagged in the way that Kodi has previously needed. For example say you have artist tags "artist1 with artist2", but no ARTISTS tag and no Musicbrainz ID tags. If you know that no artists in your collection have " with " in their name then you can add " with " as an artist separator and Kodi will be able to identify "artist1" and "artist2" separately (rather than create yet another artist called "artist1 with artist2"). Or maybe you have used ";" as a separator in some music files.

At the moment this extra feature can only be set from the advancedsettings.xml, but in future versions it could be added to the settings GUI. Also v18 may have the facilty to use a variety of chars as separators in GENRE
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#9
Many thanks for, as usual, a very comprehensive reply.

The piece of the puzzle I missed is that if there is an ARTISTS tag, Kodi doesn't add the ARTIST to its list of artists and sticks it only in the song table. Now I understand this is a great feature: I can put ARTISTS "Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky / John Elliot Gardner / Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment" (unlikely combination!) while ARTIST is just "Tchaikovsky, Gardner, Orch. Enlightenment" for display purposes.
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#10
Yes, exactly Smile
This is a useful post so I may split in into its own thread (in lieu of a wiki guide - sorry guys, not enough hours in the day)
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#11
(2017-02-15, 20:17)DaveBlake Wrote: Yes, exactly Smile
This is a useful post so I may split in into its own thread (in lieu of a wiki guide - sorry guys, not enough hours in the day)

I may have a go at the wiki if it would help - do they let any riff-raff in there?

But first I need to get my head round where we can use the artistname(role) syntax.
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#12
(2017-02-15, 20:55)graham-h Wrote: I may have a go at the wiki if it would help - do they let any riff-raff in there?
Volunteers in all areas of Kodi are always welcome, but of course the team doesn't let random edits to the wiki happen, or it would have been completely wrecked by now.

The way every thing on Kodi works is that the volunteer does the thing they think thay can contribute, e.g. write a guide, or code change or whatever, and then submits it to the team for review. It is a gamble, the team could say no, so start small is always the advice.

Quote:But first I need to get my head round where we can use the artistname(role) syntax.

The PERFORMER tag on Flac files. It support multiple tags so
PERFORMER = "Janet Brown(Oboe)"
PERFORMER = "London Symphony Orchestra(orchestra)"

Or the TMCL and TIPL tags in ID3 v2.4 which is an array of role, name pairs where every odd entry is a function (e.g. Producer, Arranger etc.) or instrument (e.g. Orchestra, Vocal, Piano) and every even is an artist or a comma delimited list of artists.

Tagging software usually present the on screen values in different ways e.g.
Mp3tag shows
MUSICIANCREDITS = "Oboe:Janet Brown;orchestra: London Symphony Orchestra"

while Picard shows
Performer [Oboe] = "Janet Brown"
Performer [orchestra] = "London Symphony Orchestra"

ARRANGER, ENGINEER, PRODUCER, DJMIXER, MIXER have their own tags in Flac, but are done using TIPL in mp3
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#13
(2017-02-10, 13:01)DaveBlake Wrote:
(2017-02-10, 12:46)beedaddy Wrote: Hmm, so I always need ALBUMARTISTS, which consists exactly of the names from ALBUMARTIST, seperated by "/"?
When there are multiple album artists, and the names are not separated by artists separators (since "," is sometimes part of a name and sometimes not Kodi can not assume it is a separator) then yes. Historically the separator is space-slash-space by default, but you can tell Kodi to use a variety of different separators for artists including ";", or " feat. " etc.

Just as a side note: I'm in the process of adding the ALBUMARTISTS tag. In some cases, this does not help. In my despair I then removed the MUSICBRAINZ tags and then it worked. This surprised me (since I set the provider for album information to "Local information only").
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#14
(2017-02-20, 21:17)beedaddy Wrote: Just as a side note: I'm in the process of adding the ALBUMARTISTS tag. In some cases, this does not help. In my despair I then removed the MUSICBRAINZ tags and then it worked. This surprised me (since I set the provider for album information to "Local information only").

There could be two explanations: some of the files got their size or date changed when you tagged them and some did not (so Kodi didn't re-scan them) or else the MB tags overrode the ALBUMARTISTS. Tags are presumably 'local information' whether 'you' wrote them or Picard wrote them.

The whole business of how Kodi merges on-line information with tags is a mystery. I haven't been able to see any difference between 'Prefer online information' on or off. Certainly, Kodi scrapes less data from MB than Picard does.
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#15
(2017-02-20, 21:48)graham-h Wrote: some of the files got their size or date changed when you tagged them and some did not (so Kodi didn't re-scan them)
This is not possible because – and sorry that I didn't mention that – I deleted all files on the kodi device, purging the database. I edited the tags on my desktop computer (FLAC), re-encoded them into OPUS files and then copied them to the kodi device (Raspberry Pi with LibreELEC). And after the first mistakes, I checked kodis behaviour beforehand with a test-installation on my desktop computer (Arch Linux). So not detecting them as modified files can not be the case.
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