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Tstrbl
Senior Member
Posts: 110
I have two versions of Stabat Mater Dolorosa by two different composers. I have tagged each work 'Stabat Mater' in the album field, but obviously composer, hence artist tags are different. Many of the other fields are the same because they both appear on the same release. If I leave it like this and scan the folder into my library neither of them display. When I change the album tag of one of them to Stabat Mater A, they both display properly. Any idea what is really happening here and whether is it possible to have files with different artist tags but identical album tags display properly?
Thanks
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In the absence of Musicbrainz ID tags, Kodi uses album title and album artist name(s) to identify albums uniquely. You say artist tags are different between the two albums, but what of the album artist? If no ALBUMARTIST (TPE2) tag is given Kodi uses the ARTIST (TPE1) tag providing this tag has the same value in all the music files, otherwise it sets album artist as "various artists". I can only guess that is what has happened.
Or do you also have Musicbrainz ID tags, and have been editing other tags manually? That can cause odd things too. If you can't see that the tagging problem is then post the tag values in full and I will see if I can spot the issue.
But I would also advise you to tag your Classical music files with Musicbrainz ID tags (by using Picard), as I found it makes it easier to get consistent results (composer name spelling etc.) and identify unique releases e.g. more than one Beethoven, Symphony No. 5.
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I see your point but my first question, what do you see as the best practice tagging convention for classical?
What MusicBrainz seeks to do I think is kind of ambitious for user-maintained data but has potential as I know there have been efforts to clean up the data.
What data is stored in the library and how that is displayed are IMO different questions. The Kodi Album Artist credit string might not be too useful as a display string for navigating your music as an example. It really is up to the skin to do a better job. But certainly the default user experience is directed towards song and album artists and you have to kind of dig around to get to more useful things like composer or orchestra.
For me, the MusicBrainz "work" entity offers a potential way to better organize classical music in Kodi.
The PERFORMER tag (and variants) offers a flexible way to deal with some things, but you need to enforce your own standards as MusicBrainz isn't always the best here. For example if you are interested in a certain Soprano you could use PERFORMER to tag, but in some cases the same vocalist might be credited Soprano and others Soprano I, which are grouped separately in Kodi roles.
scott s.
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