[BikerDude]

@BikerDude I think we may have cross posted.

Since that playlist folder contains junk as well as .xsp, it is even more reason to use a folder on a shared drive for library music rather than the whole drive itself as music source. But check those recent posts from Karellen and I

@DaveBlake sorry for this 

for sure I will move the files and the playlists to separate shares. this is an easy fix we can do this ...LOL

[BikerDude]

Hello all

Success, As suggested I deleted the playlists folder, the mymusic72, cleared the library removed the library source and restarted kodi. Ilthe restarted kodi loading the development share and it resulted with 3506 songs. Since this morning I have been adding the deleted artist one by one and passing them through MB. MB saved them in my musicbrainz share i verified them and the moved them to the development share. In kodi I updated the library as i was going along and it registered the songs I added and i reconciled them to a running total. 

It matches...no duplicates

IMHO the documentation should spell out that the the playlist should not be in the same folder or share. However, In today's environment as the libraries are getting larger and that many individuals turning to external drives that may be networked and shared and that in a household there may be several devices share these libraries, that many of the userdata contents should be possible to move them to the external / NAS drives so to share the library DB, setting and to some extent configuration of KODI and here one could put the playlists and the thumbnails. Setting things up and configuring them every time we need to re initiate a library scrape for information on each machine take time I personally have 4 devices that run KOdi. I i were to have all my settings on the nas I would not even need to update the library. Kodi would just read the nas library All this could be in advancesettings. 

Yes i am simplifying but you surely get the gist

anyhow   

thanks to @DaveBlake , @black_eagle and @Karellen for all your great help, guidance, teachings, patience and understanding

[DaveBlake]

Happy to help @BikerDude, I have learnt from it so that is good. Glad you are moving forwards now.

IMHO the documentation should spell out that the the playlist should not be in the same folder or share.

Honestly we didn't know having .xsp files on the media source it could have the consequnces that it does, so not surprizing it is not documented.

What can be highlighted is that it is best to have media sources point at folder(s) that only contain the kind of media that library handles. Pointing at a drive with mixed and diverse contents is not a good idea.

In fact I would recommned having multiple music sources as a means of splitting your music into categories, each pointing at folders with just music. But that is another feature, and I suspect for now you just want to get a library working.

However, In today's environment as the libraries are getting larger and that many individuals turning to external drives that may be networked and shared and that in a household there may be several devices share these libraries, that many of the userdata contents should be possible to move them to the external / NAS drives so to share the library DB, setting and to some extent configuration of KODI and here one could put the playlists and the thumbnails. Setting things up and configuring them every time we need to re initiate a library scrape for information on each machine take time I personally have 4 devices that run KOdi. I i were to have all my settings on the nas I would not even need to update the library. Kodi would just read the nas library All this could be in advancesettings. 

Sharing media is fine, but user data has to be local to the device Kodi is installed on. Kodi looks in userdata for the smart playlists and will not access .xsp files anywhere else.

You can switch to a client/server set-up for Kodi that would enable all Kodi devices to use the same libraries (held in MariaDb/MySQL databases on the server rather than local Sqlite ones), but that is an advanced and still "experimental" feature of Kodi (despite having many users using it). But AFAIK devices set-up that way still have local userdata and hence local smart playlists.

But discussion of client/server is another subject, so let's not digress on this thread. Get your tagging sorted, and enjoy the resulting music library for a while

[black_eagle]

But AFAIK devices set-up that way still have local userdata and hence local smart playlists.

Doesn't have to be set up like that.  You can use path substitution to share all sorts of things around between different Kodi instances.

For instance, I share the favourites off one machine to all my others.  When it's updated on the main rig, it automatically is replicated to all the others.  All that is needed is an advancedsettings.xml on each of the other machines.  I also use path subs to replicate the playlists on each machine so that they are all the same.  Creating or modifying a playlist on any machine is auto replicated on all the others.

I use mariadb for the database server and my media (both video and audio) is shared via NFS and SMB.  The NFS shares are strictly for my media and SMB is for the kids.  This way I don't need to worry that adding something to a library might accidentally end up on the Kids Pi as it hasn't got the credentials needed to access the NFS shares.

The main instance of Kodi has all the sources added to it and that's the one that does any scraping and updating of the libraries. Because everything is done with network paths, none of the other machines need any sources adding to them.  TV is also networked around the house, but that's just a case of pointing the TVH addon on each machine at the server and the backend takes care of the rest.

So yes, it is perfectly possible to have multiple instances of Kodi around your house but have them all sharing a centralized pool of data.  You just have to be sensible about what you are substituting across instances.  You can't substitute special://musicplaylists/ and special://videoplaylists/ you have to do the top level special://profile/playlists/ and substitute the lot for it to work.

[DaveBlake]

Helpful but off topic post @black_eagle so I will split it out later into a new thread along with the relevent part  of the previous posts. leaving here now just so @BikerDude can notice it.

[BikerDude]

Hi Folks 

Not tht is of much interest to you all but i have not almost completed my phase 2 of this repair. 

I would uest like to say that Kodi is a great solution thanks to individuals such as your good selves.

Because of the help you offered me Today finally i have put the files in the production share and performed the appropriate redundancy. I have used path substitution to move the plaists to the music folder. However Thank to your input In my documents share (yes I know i need to perform some maintenance here) and created a folder called KODI where I will put the playlist there.
I tried to use Plex and Emby to achieve this the servers work fine however their client solution is lacking. Even using the EMBY plugin in kodi, the solution works fine but for the music i always had to revert back to KODI. A thought (not pertinent here) why not use KODI a client to EMBY. without the plugin. They are excellent on the centralised server management bit KODI is excellent as a media send player and manager  

I agree with @DaveBlake this shouldn't here but in its own thread. Like music is. Because this would be of interest to many individuals.


Once again Thank you all for your help

[BikerDude]

Hello all

Just an update, Since monday i have been listening to music ...Thank you. 

I have come across some additional issues. Please bear in mind that i have put all my music through MB. Yet still some tracks have problems. Specifically when selecting The Hollies Gasoline alley Bred,  Nat King Cole's Unforgettable plays instead. I went to the hollies folder and selected the song and from there I played it into Kodi. Still I get Unforgettable.

I ran the hollies track through MB. However MB identifies it as a hollies track immediately which is correct. Many of the songs on the hollies album refer to coles music. I deleted this album and re ripped it and it works. and all is fine.

What i wanted to point out is if MB instead of identifying automatically the song and suggesting an album (an this is fine for 90% of the songs), MB should Park the all songs in the in the center column then the individual clusters them and he can choose to lookup the songs or scan them. In this way, I would have been able to can the songs and correctly Identify the songs and tag them appropriately. 

Just a thought to pass on

[docwra]

Yes picard is not always perfect, I usually scan rather than identify automatically.

Its always worth submitting your acoustids with picard as well (you will need to apply for an api key and add in the settings). This will help others auto identify better in the future.

[BikerDude]

hell all

I'M Baaaack

all is progressing well with the playlist rebuild thanks to you all. 

I have hi a snag 

when i ply one of the playlists, and the song chosen is from the greatest hits album of an artists and it displays that information on the top right hand of the screen what plays is a different song.

upon investigation i find that both songs come from a greatest hits album from both artists. so i ran both artists through MB all was (according to MB) fine but this did not resolver my issue.

What are my options?
uses something similar to MB if which one would you recommend? (i tried mp3tag but was not happy with it)
If all is well what would trigger KODI to play a different song?

as always thank you for all your help.

wb