Using Album Type to make large music collections more accessible
#1
Users may be missing what can be done in Krypton onwards with album type to help make large music collections more accessible.

This came up in another thread
(2018-01-03, 23:01)BatterPudding Wrote: When I open up a band like Pink Floyd on my system it is hard to find an album as there is SOOOO much in there all gathered together. The official albums are in with the remastered, re-releases, special editions, official concerts, dodgy bootlegs, official bootlegs, obscure releases. On the filing system these are generally in different folders - but that is not something KODI is aware of. So there is no natural way of filtering this all at the moment.
Actually Kodi is aware of album path, and can make smart playlists using it, for example a list of albums with "special edition" in the path. But smart playlists are probably too static to be a complete navigation solution.

The more dynamic filter facility - available from the side blade menu - does not currently include album path as a parameter. I could look at adding that, but in the longer term I would rather add a custom property facility instead that could be set manually or in a batch using path or other smart playlist rules. That way you could set whatever properties you wanted for an album (or artist) and use those to sort, filter etc.

In the meantime all is not lost.

For every album Kodi stores an album type, which is just text and can be anything a user wants. Album type is one of the currently supported filter properties (as well as being smart playlist rule), so if the special edition albums had a type of "Special Edition" it would be easy to filter them when looking at a long list of albums.

Album type is initially populated from a tag embedded in musicfiles, in the various formats:
MusicBrainz/Album Type (ASF)
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM TYPE (ID3 for mp3 files)
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMTYPE (APE)
RELEASETYPE (Xiph/Vorbis for FLAC files) [unfortunately named and not to be confused with the internal releasetype Kodi uses that is either "album" or "single"]

Picard generically calls this tag "release type" (again not to be confused with the internal releasetype Kodi uses) will fill it by default with the Musicbrainz release group type (see https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Release_Group/Type). This can be things like "album / compilation" or "EP / Live" or "soundtrack", mostly it is just "album". Hence this tag could be replaced with values that have more meaning to the user e.g. "Special Edition", "bootleg" etc. It can also be added or edited in other tag editors such as Mp3tag, just ensure that the correct tag name is used for the tag format.

Album type value can also be populated from scraping album NFO files, it is the <type> xml tag, for example <type>Special Edition</type>. However the NFO value is only applied if either no value was scanned from music file tags, or if "Prefer online information" is enabled.

So @BatterPudding to separate your remasters, re-releases, special editions, official concerts, dodgy bootlegs, official bootlegs, and obscure releases etc. why not use "album type"? Not sure which approach - tags or NFO - is easilest for you, but give it a try and then when navigating albums use the filter from the side blade.
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#2
Actually an easy way, is to adjust the NFO file for that album, similar to what you do for Movies.

For example...

Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope Theatrical Release
Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope LaserDisc Edition
Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope 1997 Special Edition BluRay
Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope 2004 Special Edition DVD
Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope 2006 Special Edition DVD with THX
Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope DeSpecialized Edition

Simply changing the name in the NFO file will cause this to show up in Kodi's library, making it easier to sort. I use the tool MediaElch, to easily make these changes to the NFO files, and can see the results in Kodi after a Library update and Clean.
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#3
Yes if "Prefer online info" is enabled then NFOs can be used to change the title of the album. You could also have tagged the songs with different album titles (not effect scraping as long as also have mbids so not relying on lookup by name) but is either really what you want to do?

Putting it in the name makes it sortable, but putting it in album type makes is filterable. If you were going to use NFO files to set things then I would still suggest album type is useful in this respect.
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#4
Musicbrainz also has a "release status" but it only offers a couple of options like "official" and "bootleg".

scott s.
.
maintainer of skin  Aeon MQ5 mods for post-Gotham Kodi releases:
Matrix see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Matrix release thread
Nexus see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Nexus release thread
Aeon MQ 5 skin and addon repo 11.1.0
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#5
(2018-01-05, 22:37)scott967 Wrote: Musicbrainz also has a "release status" but it only offers a couple of options like "official" and "bootleg".
True, but the limited content of this bespoke tag makes me unenthusiastic to read an add it to the music library. I feel the same about ASIN (Amazon id), ISRC and catalog number. We need to use the data we have better first.
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#6
I've always simply used a "path" rule with my nodes to filter the special editions or greatest hits albums.

then I just make sure the album folder name has something like "Greatest_Hits" in it.

Works quite well for what I need.
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