Confused on how to deal with compilation albums with album artists and release series
#16
(2020-06-20, 10:06)black_eagle Wrote: albumartists should contain all of the artists on an album except where the album artist is various artists when it too should be set to that.

For instance, the 'Live in Australia" album by Elton John (https://musicbrainz.org/release/c4c14129...0feaaf64ac ) has the artist and album artist set to 'Elton John with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra' but the albumartists tag is set to 'Elton John;Melbourne Symphony Orchestra'.  Do note that when editing this tag in Picard each artist is listed on a separate line but that it will show in the tag listing with the semi-colon separator.  Whether this is actually what is written into the tag I haven't looked to see but it doesn't matter any way as Picard will write the tags correctly in a format that Kodi will read.  Therefore, users don't really need to know what the actual separator is.

All you really need to know is that you have to set that little bit of scripting in Picard so that it can take care of writing that tag for you.  Then, when you scan that album into Kodi you will get two artists, Elton John and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.  The album will be listed under Elton John, along with any other of his albums, and also listed under Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (along with any other albums they might feature on).

Try not to worry too much about what goes in what tag and just let Picard do the work for you.  Unless you have good reasons to there is generally no need to re-edit the tags before saving the album after Picard has fetched the tag data.
Much as I like Picard though I want to be able using hte mutagen library to manage tags in scripts.To wit I am curious and don't wish to delegate everything to Picard. I would use Picard to experiment and learn ;-). You see Picard is fine for tagging an album. But I have a library of such proportions it takes an overnight script run just to scan the thing, and applying tag correction rules I do with scripts. Spot issues I cna do in a GUI like Picard.
Reply
#17
The advantage of having Musicbrainz ID tags in your music files is
  • More accurate and faster (only one request not two) scraping of additional artist and album information
  • Ability to have multiple releases of the same album, or handle albums where the artist + album name are not unique.
If you are going to use Musicbrainz ID tags  then they need to be consistent and complete across the music files for an album e.g. no good adding album mbid tags but skipping the artist ones, or tagging one music file and not the other.

The best way to achieve that is to use Picard to tag your files.

I am uncertain (my bad memory) that the Mutagen library correctly supports multi-frame tags e.g. when tagging a music file with two genre values, or two artist values. I know that the tag names for the various mbid tags are inconsistent across different tag formats (a Picard design flaw IMO) which means that tagging tools in the past when trying to mimic that Picard tagging have used the wrong tag name and Kodi is only looking for the ones specified by Picard. The number of values in the multi-frame tags need to match e.g. number of ALBUMARTISTS values and number of MUSICBRAINZ ALBUMARTIST ID.

ALBUMARTISTS and ARTISTS tags: these are added to help with identifying individual artists in single frame tag formats or where the user wants to display something like "Artist A (feat. Artist B and Artist C)" as the song or album artist. For example "Earth, Wind and Fire" is one artist but "Artist A and Artist B" is not, nor is "Beethoven; Charles Markkeras, LPO", and Kodi wants to be able to identify individual artists. It becomes even more important with mbid tags: give Kodi 3 mbid tag values and "Artist A (feat. Artist B and Artist C)" how should it know what the 3 artist names are that go with the 3 mbids?

Hence tag as follows
ARTIST : "Artist A (feat. Artist B and Artist C)"
ARTISTS: Artist A  / Artist B / Artist C - using either a single string with standard slash-space-slash separator or  a multi-frame value
(optional)
MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID: mbidA / mbidB / mbidC - again slash-space-slash separator or  a multi-frame value

Likewise with album artists of collaboration albums e.g. Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, "Rising Sand"
(Note I do NOT mean compilations where songs are by different people, but albums by multiple artists in there own right. Classical music has many of these where the album artists can be the composer, orchestra, conductor and soloists)

ALBUMARTIST : "Artist A; Artist B, Artist C"
ALBUMARTISTS: Artist A  / Artist B / Artist C - using either a single string with standard slash-space-slash separator or  a multi-frame value
(optional)
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUMARTIST ID: mbidA / mbidB / mbidC - again slash-space-slash separator or  a multi-frame value

For music with one album artist and/or one artist (often the same but not always)  the ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tags are not necessary, but wherever there is more than one then they are there to enable Kodi to split into individual artists. The older way to do this was to either use a or a multi-frame format like ID3 v2.4 (not all old players would handle it) or to always use a standard separator e.g. Artist / ArtistB with ID3 v2.3 (single frame tags) , but that isn't how people want to see the song strist displayed.
 
Quote:But I have a library of such proportions it takes an overnight script run just to scan the thing
Kodi can still make a good job even of a large music collection, providing you tag consistently. Good luck.
Reply
#18
Thanks Dave, that is a much appreciate clarification of the roles and formats!


EDIT:
@ThumbOne you don't need to requote previous posts in full, makes things much less readable. Either just post on the thread, or edit out any excess quoting.
@DaveBlake noted!
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
Confused on how to deal with compilation albums with album artists and release series0