[BatterPudding]

During my retagging blitz I am finding another issue.  I rip with EAC and partially tag the FLACs with the Musicbrainz addon.

I then move those ripped files over to Musicbrainz Picard and do a full lookup online.  OCD taking over and making sure I find the exact release, or update Musicbrainz to include it.  Picard then fills in the FULL MB data on the release.

The aim is to have perfect and complete Musicbrainz tags on all of my self-ripped collection.


I am finding a problem with a multi-disc box sets.  They seem to be handled the same as a double album.

An example is this one:

https://musicbrainz.org/release/715ecb77...802c9be9d9

That is David Bowie's "Five Years".  It is a box set of 12 discs, each one being a separate album.


This means that Picard will give all 12 of these disk the release name of "Five Years 1969–1973"

Problem is KODI thinks this is then just one long album called "Five Years 1969–1973" and no way to tell when one ends and the next starts.  Also the artwork is just one single item, instead of separate art per disk.

In the "Disc Subtitle" tag are the names of the separate albums:

David Bowie a.k.a. Space Oddity
The Man Who Sold the World
Hunky Dory
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
Aladdin Sane
Pinups
Live Santa Monica ’72
Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture Soundtrack (disc 1)
Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture Soundtrack (disc 2)
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (2003 mix)
Re:Call 1 (disc 1)
Re:Call 1 (disc 2)

Ideally if there is a "Disc Subtitle" tag, then it would be good if this is be displayable some how.  Especially when the disk count is higher than 1.


Happy to hack this in my own collection using .nfos, smart playlists, skin tattoo, voodoo or whatever suggestion.  I know you are a busy bunny   I just thought I should add in some of the oddities that pure Musicbrainz tagging is going to show up.

I have a number of boxsets like this where the BOX has one name and set of artwork, and then the separate DISKS in that box each have their own titles and artwork. 

My perfect solution would be Box Art AND disk art at the various levels.  Ideally I'd see "Five Years 1969-1973" listed under David Bowie, and clicking into that would then show the 12 separate albums with their own art as separate entities.  Even better if a search can locate the separate disks.


There are a few other occasions where multiple disks are separate entities like this.  Anniversary re-releases often have the Original album, then a disk or two of "extras".  Or those "Deluxe" releases with a few live versions tagged on a second disk.

[DaveBlake]

Yes I know, all good examples. It is not so much having multiple discs that is the issue, some "deluxe editions" are still only from one CD, yet it would be nice to split the bonus tracks.

So the general requirement is to be able to split releases (albums in Kodi), especially large ones with many songs,  into parts or subsets each having own art and a subtitle. Often a subset may equate to a CD in a box set, but it is not compulsory.

Yet to work through if I would use the GROUPING/TIT1 tag for this, or SUBTITLE/TIT3 tag. Then there is what happens with the UI - inserting an optional level between album (release) and song. Do we ever mix albums with album-parts? That may sound odd, but someone is bound to ask to see a CD level list as if they had thrown all the single CD albums and CDs from box sets out on the floor.

[BatterPudding]

I can get you some example tags \ files if you want to see this in the flesh.

When allowing Picard to set MusicBrainz tags for this boxset

The main points:

* ALL of these tracks will share "Album", "Album Artist", "MusicBrainz Release Id", "MusicBrainz Release Group ID", which points to the title of the BOX set.  Meaning KODI currently sees one single "album"

* All tracks which are on disk 1 of 12 would have a "Disk Subtitle" of "David Bowie a.k.a. Space Oddity".  KODI can't see this level currently.


I can see you already jumping into a more flexible option, but your comment about "deluxe editions tagging files on the end of a single disk" is not something that is ever shown in the tags.  I was trying to keep this example "simple" to something that is defined within MusicBrainz tags now.

I was thinking that a "Total Discs" tag in a file would be an initial flag to allow this potential feature to be spotted.


This will only be needed in a few special cases.  Boxsets tend to be a smaller part of a collection.  So it would seem fine to me if we have to manually define the sets.

[DaveBlake]

This will only be needed in a few special cases. Boxsets tend to be a smaller part of a collection. So it would seem fine to me if we have to manually define the sets.

Not sure I get what you are saying.

I know many users see a box set of CDs as many albums and therefore the new feature would be gathering albums into sets or seeing all the albums from a set individually mixed with other albums. That is a way to think of it, but... Since Gotham when integration with Musicbrainz was added, we have album = musicbrainz release, and as you have shown that includes boxed sets as a release.

So yes Kodi currently sees a box set (that has one Musicbrainz release ID) as one single album, and it will continue to do so because I sure don't want to unweave the Musicbrainz integration! This means handling boxed sets is about splitting albums into parts, something that should be able to be done from tags not manually, and while we do that we can be flexible and forwards looking because it doesn't make the work involved any harder.

Just like the old vinyl days when things I now have on one CD were split across two records, splitting things across mulpile CDs is often musically irrelevent. Sometimes CD 2 is a musical continuation of CD 1, and sometimes CD1 contains a mix of musically separate things. Streaming and downloads is going to make non-musical physical media splits even less meaningful.

This is a design discussion, and thinking aloud, I have even changed my mind while typing

I was going to continue and say that I would not want to split by DISCNUMBER alone. But then again "40 Greatest Love Songs" maybe musically coherent, it would still be nice to just be able to queue the songs from say disc 2. I'll think some more.

BTW since we scan all the song files and store the disc number there is no need to look at DISCTOTAL/TOTALDISCS tags other than being able to say "disc x of y" even when we do not have all the discs in the library. Otherwise want to know how many discs in an album, just look at max disc number of those stored.

So maybe using DISCSUBTITLE/TSST and DISCNUMBER /TPOS tags are the way to go for this. Manually editing tags to split off bonus material to a fake 2nd disc if a user wanted.

Node navigation would look like Genres>Artists>Albums>(Discs>)Songs, with a discs level for albums with more than one disc. Then "*All" on the Discs level takes you to a list of all the songs on the album. But what about *All on the Albums level? My initial thought is same as before, you get all the songs on those albums and skip the disc level if there is one. Adding a navigation level/node UI is actually much more work than the data and tag scanning side of things. Oh and telling the JSON clients about discs too.

Would have to implement pick-up of disc level art from the folder layout, but the art changes I am currently working on would cover skin and JSON access for it.

BTW I would still like to implement GROUPING/TIT1 and SUBTITLE/TIT3 handling, even if nothing more than properies of a song that can be searched on and used in filter rules etc.

[BatterPudding]

(Ignore the "not sure what I am saying bit")

I am certainly not suggesting any unweaving.  This is more about how MusicBrainz is seeing a "release" as a package.  Kodi then seeing that package as a single album.  It hit home most for me when I scanned in a Pink Floyd boxset called Discovery... with 16 disks...  kinda funny playing that one "album". 


You have certainly got the point.  Your sets idea is covering the situation well.  You have the picture correct.  As I expected you would.

Agree with everything you are saying there.  Certainly will be some releases like "40 greatest love songs" that would stay as a single entity.  And others will have natural splits at disk levels.


With the node navigation that also seems to make sense.  Your logic there will cover most cases.  If someone clicks on their "40 greatest love songs" disks they would see Disk 1, disk 2, all.

If someone clicked at the top level of "40 greatest love songs" and hit play, it would naturally queue up both disks.  If they dig down, the could just queue up disk 1.  Or queue up all.


And that would be same with the box - they can queue it up from the box level, or from the disk level.

The Bowie example above has the Ziggy Stardust album split over two disks.  So would then act more like the "40 greatest love songs" where someone is likely to queue up both disk 1 and disk 2 to play.

[DaveBlake]

It hit home most for me when I scanned in a Pink Floyd boxset called Discovery... with 16 disks...  kinda funny playing that one "album". 

Sure is.
For me it is the radio play version of LOTR, with 13 discs that no way are you going to queue in one go, that made the point. You also need the disc titles to make sense of where you are in the story.

The Bowie example above has the Ziggy Stardust album split over two disks.  So would then act more like the "40 greatest love songs" where someone is likely to queue up both disk 1 and disk 2 to play.

Yes, that would be one more click  of course than now, but worth it rather than having to go to song level and select the songs from a disc one at a time to hear say one part of the set.

On my list of things to do

[scott967]

Musicbrainz has the concept of release "media".  A release has at least one medium.  Each medium has its own attributes of format (CD, 12" vinyl etc) and title and contains a set (tracklist) of recordings.   I could in theory see if the music library had the concept of "medium" it might be possible to better link releases which combine a CD medium and a DVD (music video) medium, in addition to this case where the medium title is identical to some other release group title.

scott s.
.