[onewaytrigger]

I'm on Kodi 16 but I believe I would face the same situation on Kodi 17.

While I know I could simply tag the artist field with " / " as an separator I can't do that as am lastfm user. Let's consider teh song "Something Just Like This" as an exemple. The song artist on itunes and stream is "The Chainsmokers & Coldplay" and it has 72K scrobbles while the ones tagged with "The Chainsmokers / Coldplay" has only 576...

"Why don't you simply keep it 'The Chainsmokers & Coldplay' "?
Fanarts.


Kodi somehow assumes that a song with an artist other than the album artis is a Various Artist and then it display VA fanart. If the song artist is separated with " / " then it shows fanart fore the album artist and if I'm using Artist Slideshow addon it shows fanart for both Chainsmokers and Coldplay!


In short: I just want " & " on artist field act like " / ".

[jjd-uk]

You have to create an advancedsettings.xml file and add "&" as a artist separator, see http://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#musiclibrary it's not used as default as there are plenty of bands & duos with & in their name that shouldn't be separated.

[onewaytrigger]

there are plenty of bands & duos with & in their name that shouldn't be separated.

Sure it would cause a lot of mess but I can't think of a better solution. I can't understand why Kodi assumes songs like that as VA songs.
Anyway I tried to tag my song with non-breaking space - & - non-breaking space (alt+255) and add it to advancedsettings.xml with no sucess.

I don't know how many people is adding their Music library bought on itunes to Kodi, but I think it should be taken in consideration as it is a very usual case.

[DaveBlake]

In short: I just want " & " on artist field act like " / ".

You can get v17 to use " & " as an additional artist separator, but this will most likely be problematic as some artists have ampersand in their name e.g "Earth, Wind & Fire". It just does not make a good spearator.

The other way to tell v17 Kodi that "The Chainsmokers & Coldplay" is two artists is to use the ARTISTS tag with "The Chainsmokers / Coldplay". Kodi gives priority to the ARTISTS tag to identify individual artists , you could always add this tag to the file you get from itunes.

Why don't you simply keep it "The Chainsmokers & Coldplay"?

If you just tag with ARTIST = "The Chainsmokers & Coldplay", with no Musicbrainz Id tags, or ARTISTS (only v17 makes use of that) then Kodi will create an artist called "The Chainsmokers & Coldplay". But of course it will be unable to find any art or additional info for this artist.

I'm not sure what you think Kodi is changing?

Kodi somehow assumes that a song with an artist other than the album artist is a Various Artist and then it display VA fanart. If the song artist is separated with " / " then it shows fanart fore the album artist and if I'm using Artist Slideshow addon it shows fanart for both Chainsmokers and Coldplay!

How could Kodi know that sometimes " & " is separator but others it is part of the name of a single artist? As you have it Kodi is finding album artist is different from song artist (it can not see "The Chainsmokers" on that song), and so is giving that art.

I can't understand why Kodi assumes songs like that as VA songs.

It doesn't. It sees that is has album artist A ("The Chainsmokers"), but song artist B ("The Chainsmokers & Coldplay" as single artist), and it has no info or art for B. As A is different from B, and the fanart slide show addon shows "various artists" art.

Anyway I tried to tag my song with non-breaking space - & - non-breaking space (alt+255) and add it to advancedsettings.xml with no sucess.

Multiple artists separators is only available in Krypton.

I don't know how many people is adding their Music library bought on itunes to Kodi, but I think it should be taken in consideration as it is a very usual case.

I repeat how could Kodi know that sometimes " & " is separator but others it is part of the name of a single artist? It may be common iTunes tagging to use " & " for guest artists, but it is technically a poor practice. Improving the tagging for the music you own (to get the art you want) seems a reasonable thing to do.

Perhaps the slideshow addon could change to use just the album artist if that is all it has art for?

[onewaytrigger]

I repeat how could Kodi know that sometimes " & " is separator but others it is part of the name of a single artist? It may be common iTunes tagging to use " & " for guest artists, but it is technically a poor practice. Improving the tagging for the music you own (to get the art you want) seems a reasonable thing to do.

Perhaps the slideshow addon could change to use just the album artist if that is all it has art for?

The only way I found of using " & " as separator without screw with artists wich havi it in their name was:

-Clean the entire music library from Kodi.
-Leave only single artists with & in their name in my Music folder (I moved all the rest to another folder) and serform a scan on Kodi.
-Bring back the rest of artist to my music folder and add the line "<itemseparator> & </itemseparator>" to my advancedsettings.xml.
As the changes will only take effect on newly added artist it won't mess with the previoulsy added ones.


I did all that procedure just to find out next it was totally unnecessary
I was wrong about MusicBrainz Picard. The naming for artist is pretty much the same of iTunes. The song artist is "The Chainsmokers & Coldplay" too so I wouldn't get any misidentified song subimited to lastfm. Next thing that hold me back from using MB Picard naming was the featured artist removed from song title and added to the artist field but I shortly found a handy plugin that allowed me to move it back to song title.

So everything is ok now: proper slideshow for multi arist songs and scrobbling to lastfm.