[Tstrbl]

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

[DaveBlake]

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.

[Tstrbl]

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.

Thanks. This is exactly what happened. I added album artist tags and all is well, both 'Stabat Mater' albums display in their respective composer folders.

As for Musicbrainz, to be completely frank, it's not very good at tagging classical music. I occasionally use it if I need to identify files but it adds a lot of junk tags, massive album artist strings that include soloists, conductor even orchestra. It tags everything inconsistently and in what I consider an ugly way. It uses first names instead of surnames as an ordering principle which is wrong, in my view, when it comes to classical music. In sum, Musicbrainz was not designed to work with classical music. It has been adapted to do the job and does not do the job well. All of this is obviously just my opinion.

[scott967]

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.
.

[Tstrbl]

I see your point but my first question, what do you see as the best practice tagging convention for classical?

 The best tagging practice should separate the most important search/display fields.
These are, in my system:
[composer] [orchestra/ensemble] [work] [soloist] [release date] [recording date] [first performance/date of composition] [conductor] [label/code]
Obviously, Kodi is nowhere near being able to work with these, but this is the core information.
At the moment I make [composer]=[artist][album artist]; [work]=[album] and usually split large works into parts to match release track numbering. Ultimately though, I care little about the release itself and more about the recording date. Smaller works I usually group together in [album] as "Rectial: [Soloist]"

I don't really hope for perfection here, but the best way to fix this would be to establish a universal database supervised by some non commercial entity that would simply assign every single work in the standard repertory [as a start] a unique digital ID. Each one of these unique IDs would be associated with a properly formatted set of [composer][work][first performance/date of composition] tags and could also include more extensive metadata at some later date. On this basis a second set of unique release IDs would then be combinded with the work ID to produce the full tag set. I'm not a digital information engineer...maybe it's a flawed, unrealistic approach...

[docwra]

If its wrong on Musicbrainz then feel free to go and fix it The site is user updateable and I know they are doing some work on classical right now.