Assuming my work is eventually approved v18 will handle all this better.
But let's discuss v17 and music file structure
(2017-10-16, 20:25)Bryan_W Wrote: Now, with that all said.....
Since it seems that the general consensus is that I should abort my experiment and have everything with an albumartist of "Various Artists" and MBID of 89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377 as a separate subfolder of the VA folder, I'm now questioning my entire plan for my library structure.
My plan was to divide my collection between Classical and "everything else". My reasoning for this was to perhaps make node/playlist creation easier. To accomplish this my hierarchy would be - Music\Classical\Artist and Music\Modern\Artist. Since both divisions would have their own VA releases, would I be creating problems by having a Various Artists folder for each "branch"? Should I not divide into Classical/Modern and just have an "All my Music"\Artists structure? Or go the other way and have three "branches" ....Classical\Modern\Various Artists, where the Various Artists branch would contain all compilations regardless of "type"?
As I heard back from others having part albums is fairly normal, and Kodi does not mind at all. As you know it is fussy about manually edited tags and mbid tags matching up consistently - if you edit names then you need to edit mbids to match.
The issues with folder structure all relate to locating
local art work (and nfo files). lf you do not have local art then the folder structure could be completely flat, or mixed (impractical form a human viewpoint, but Kodi would handle it). But Kodi v17 and below can look for art anywhere common to the music source paths.
Also if you have "Fetch info on update" enabled then the processing of various artist compilations before individual artists can also result in jumbled art. Hence one reason why I recommend in v17 and below leaving that setting disabled, and using "Query for all " from artists and albums nodes to fetch art and info after the library is fully populated.
My advise would be this:
a) Yes separate Classical from pop, have them as separate musc sources too.
b) Have as many compilation folders as you like, but don't leave random art where Kodi might find it.
c) Leave "Fetch info on update" disabled.
Classical music often has more than one album artist e.g. composer, conductor, orchestra (the Musicbrainz entries vary, but the sytle guidelines advise this way), so attempts to have local art will have mixed success. I organise my Classical music albums under composer, with the mixed one under a "Various Composers" folder, but I avoid having folder.jpg files anywhere except within the album folders alongside the music.
As I said v18 should be better at this.