[Littletycoon]

I"ve got issues in getting my buddha-bar cd"s grouped under one "artist" in library view. I've now got 4 buddha-bar "artists" in library view, all exactly the same artist name, with each few cd's below them. Is there any way i can get these 4 same "artists" as one under artist view. 

i know there must be some tagging issue below, but cannot get to the bottom of it. Therefore, is there another way to force a view (e.g. group all albums with title containing buddha-bar under artist name buddha-bar). I don"t really want to do a folder view since it's not really fancy (at least when i last tried a few years ago). Full musicbrainz tagging won"t solve this, buddha-bar is not the music brainz album artist

[scott967]

I would try this:

1.  Remove all the Buddha-Bar songs from your music source.  Update and clean the music library in Kodi.  That should clear out any bad database entries.

2.  Tag all Buddha-Bar songs using MB tags.  Edit tags as follows:
    a.  Create new album artists (note the "s") tag in each song with your desired "artist" name (for example, Buddha-Bar).
    b.  Create a phony GUID for this "artist" (use on-line GUID generator).
    c.  Place this GUID in the musicbrainz album artist id tag for each song.  (note: each song MUST have musicbrainz album id for this to work.)
    d.  Ensure songs are marked "compilation".

3.  Place songs back in your source and scan.  You should see the albums under your new album artist.

Alternatively, you could just edit the album artist tag (without the s) to the artist name of your choice and remove the musicbrainz album artist id tag, but doing it my way preserves the "official" album artist name as a credit that will be displayed.

In Kodi, when you see albums or songs grouped under artist having the same name, it typically means a conflict in musicbrainz id resulted in two database entries for the same artist.

scott s.
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[Littletycoon]

Thanks I'll try your album artists suggestion. However, why do i still need to mark the songs as compilation?

maybe you then also know the answer for a 2nd 'mystery'. That is that under artists view  i have the 'album artist: Various Artists for compilations, created through various methods (eg using tagscanner with discogs as source or sometimes mp3tagger but also picard).

However in the library you also have a compilations view, also with various artists as album artist. What happens is that some albums are only listed in the compilations view as various artists, not in the artist view as (album artist) under various artists. However the other way around it allways works: various artists albums accessible through artist view allways show up in the library view compilations. This is not the behaviour i want.

i want all various artists albums to be accessible through artist view. What is causing this odd behaviour ? The only clues I have is that various artists albums only showing under compilations are exclusively tagged with Picard and that for these albums "various artists" is not translated into local language when you change the kodi language.