[scott967]

Circling back to the tagging issues, most programs in their help have some sort of table showing the mapping between the fields displayed in the program and the actual tag name which is tag format dependent.  For example https://help.mp3tag.de/main_tags.html and then bump that against the kodi list music tagging (wiki) para 9.4

scott s.
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[garfield]

As not every 3 and more disc album is boxset, is there a way to exclude a specific "boxset" from the boxsets node?

It is useful to treat different editions of the same album as a boxset as it allows to have a single entry for all the album variations with convenient subnavigation. But the boxset feature requires to set the DISCNUMBER tag, otherwise it puts everything into a single huge tracklist. Is it possible to exclude the necessity to set the DISCNUMBER and operate a bunch of the different editions of the same album by only the DISCSUBTITLE tag?

Is it possible to set the default view for the boxsets once? Currently I have to adjust the view for each and every boxset.

Sometimes the album is named after the specific song which also released as a single from the album. A good examples are a-ha's "Minor Earth | Major Sky" or "Lifelines" or "Analogue" albums which include the songs of the same names and these songs were also released as singles with remixes and/or b-sides, the "Lifelines" and "Analogue" singles even offer several different versions. Is it possible to prevent joining singles and albums with the same TITLE from the same ARTIST into a single entry within KODI's library? Currently it ignores either the YEAR or RELEASETYPE tags.

Finally, is it possible to sort each album by the exact release date rather than just by YEAR? Entering the exact release date either as YYYY.MM.DD or YYYY-MM-DD into the YEAR tag gives no success.

[black_eagle]

But the boxset feature requires to set the DISCNUMBER tag

No, it doesn't.  The boxset feature requires the DISCSUBTITLE tag to be set for each disc in a set, that there are at least three such discs and that the album is not marked as a compilation album. In deciding whether or not an album is a boxset Kodi does not look at the discnumber tag at all, rather it counts the number of disc titles in the album/set. However, not setting the discnumber tag would produce undefined behaviour for multi-disc albums (boxset or not) I would have thought.
 

Is it possible to prevent joining singles and albums with the same TITLE from the same ARTIST into a single entry within KODI's library?

Should be, by the use of MBID's.  I have three different releases of Marillion's Misplaced Childhood (original album, twin disc re-issue and four disc boxset) and none of them get combined.
 

Finally, is it possible to sort each album by the exact release date rather than just by YEAR

Yes.  Set TDOR (id3v2.4) / TORY (id3v2.3) or ORIGINALDATE/ORIGINALYEAR (ogg) etc to the original release date and then select sort by original date in the sideblade.

[garfield]

But the boxset feature requires to set the DISCNUMBER tag

No, it doesn't.

I've meant "requires to set the DISCNUMBER tag to work properly". As soon as DISCNUMBER is cleared KODI returns just a plain list of tracks sorted as 1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3,etc. No matter if Artist->Album or Boxsets->Boxset was used.

With DISCNUMBER:


Without DISCNUMBER:


So it would be nice if KODI would treat the same ALBUM with different DISCSUBTITLEs as different discs within he same ALBUM with no necessity for setting the DISCNUMBER tag not only by its internal routines but for the end user also. And sort them, say alphabetically by DISCSUBTITLE in case the DISCNUMBER is not set.

For both Artist->Album or Boxsets->Boxset.

[garfield]

Finally, is it possible to sort each album by the exact release date rather than just by YEAR

Yes.  Set TDOR (id3v2.4) / TORY (id3v2.3) or ORIGINALDATE/ORIGINALYEAR (ogg) etc to the original release date and then select sort by original date in the sideblade.

My files were initially tagged with ORIGINALDATE as YYYY-MM-DD, but I've just added all other tags you've mentioned. No result. I don't even have the option to sort by original date in the Select sort method.

[black_eagle]

DISCNUMBER and TRACKNUMBER are intrinsically linked internally.  Otherwise for any multiple disc album it is impossible to determine which track belongs to which disc.  This is also the case with boxsets.  Kodi doesn't internally determine which disc a track belongs to by the disc title, it does it by the disc number as not all discs have a subtitle but all discs can have a disc number (even if it's only 1).

I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to achieve here.  I think (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that you want to make multiple individual albums into a boxset.  If that's the case then that isn't what this feature was designed to do.  It might be achievable by not using MBID's in your tags and and tagging the discsubtitles of the albums with an 'album - disctitle' type tag and numbering the discs accordingly but that would break individual album navigation and isn't something I could recommend trying.

[black_eagle]

My files were initially tagged with ORIGINALDATE as YYYY-MM-DD, but I've just added all other tags you've mentioned. No result. I don't even have the option to sort by original date in the Select sort method.

Could depend on how old your version of Matrix is.  This was merged on 9th March -> https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/17437

If you have the 'User original release date of albums for year' enabled, you will only see 'Year' as the sort option and it will only display the year, although the albums will be sorted in actual date order.  If that option is off then you should see Original Date as one of the sort options.

[garfield]

DISCNUMBER and TRACKNUMBER are intrinsically linked internally.  Otherwise for any multiple disc album it is impossible to determine which track belongs to which disc.

Is it really impossible to use DISCSUBTITLE in case the DISCNUMBER is empty? This feature will be useful in case one wants to treat several versions of the same album as a kind of Boxset. No one knows in this case which disc is №1 or №2 or №3 - they are just a bunch of the same discs with different mastering for example. In case of singles there could be even endless numbers of discs - all that regular editions, limited editions, extra limited editions, club promos, radio promos, US editions, Japanese editions and so on... Wouldn't it be easier to put all of them into a single entry under the Artist than to navigate each disc individually? Of course it is possible to number each disc but no one actually knows how to number such discs as none of then 1st, none of them 2nd...

I currently use public Alpha 2. Thank you for disable "Use original release date of albums for year" advise. As English is not my mother's I wouldn't ever imagine I should disable this settings to make it possible to sort by ORIGINALDATE. ))

[black_eagle]

Is it really impossible to use DISCSUBTITLE in case the DISCNUMBER is empty?

I'm afraid it is, you will need both.

This feature will be useful in case one wants to treat several versions of the same album as a kind of Boxset.

That isn't what this is designed to do.  It is designed to make navigation of actual boxsets easier and provide a way of grouping them all together.  It was never intended to be used as a way to try and group several editions of the same album together.

It is possible to force it to work but as I said, you will need to give each disc a number as well as a title, and drop some of the MBID's (if you are using them) to make it work.  In the screenshot below I have added the original Joshua Tree album as disc 5.  The preceding four discs are already part of a boxset.



So yes, with some work it's possible to do but I haven't tested what possible side effects it will cause when navigating outside of the boxset node as I only quickly tested with two albums that I combined.

Of course it is possible to number each disc but no one actually knows how to number such discs as none of then 1st, none of them 2nd...

How you number them is entirely up to you, remembering that they will be listed in the boxset node in disc number order and that cannot be changed.

[garfield]

 

Is it possible to prevent joining singles and albums

Should be, by the use of MBID's.

MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID works very well, thank you. The IDs entered could be whatever, non necessary actual IDs - Album or Single is quite enough.

[DaveBlake]

Just to point out @garfield that  MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID is used when scraping additional album information and artwork, so if you put any old thing in there the scraper will fail to fetch this. Otherwise whatever you choose to do with this is entirely up to you.

[garfield]

DaveBlake, you've done great work, no doubt. It is still buggy, but I'm sure it will be shiny perfect at the release date. The Music library now looks like well-organized shelf with discs in your living room, in case the music files are properly tagged.

But the proper tagging absolutely not equal to using MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz is useful for those who have just heard somewhere that flacs/mp3s/wavs could have additional info and so on but have absolutely no idea what to put into the tags. Additional album or artist information contains just some stupid unnecessary facts wrote by ones who don't know what to write about artist he/she has never heard about. The artworks not aligned and far from perfect. I would switch off the scrapping function in KODI so that there would be no clue it exists, but unfortunately I don't know how to completely hide this function from KODI other than using 3rd party themes.

I'm just trying to say that it is not necessary to strictly adhere to rules by preventing other uses of existing functions. Let users decide.

[DaveBlake]

@garfiled I'm not sure what to make of your post in response to my friendly comment on how mbids are used and hence the perhaps unforseen consequnces of using custom values.
 

I would switch off the scrapping function in KODI so that there would be no clue it exists, but unfortunately I don't know how to completely hide this function from KODI other than using 3rd party themes.

There is nothing compulsory about scraping additional artist and album information and artwork from remote sources. Disable "Fetch additional data on librray update", never select "Query Info for all" from a context menu, and never click a refresh button on the info dialog and no information is fetched. Moreover set the default album and artist scrapers to "Local Information" and access to remote sites won't happen even if a user accidentally does one of these other things.
 

I'm just trying to say that it is not necessary to strictly adhere to rules by preventing other uses of existing functions. Let users decide.

Sure, no rules from me just information. I'm a big advocate for users being as creative as they like, and try to implement flexible features that empower them. As I said whatever you choose to do is entirely up to you.

As for "It is still buggy, but I'm sure it will be shiny perfect at the release date", there is little more niggling to a dev than users saying a general "it is buggy". I'll assume you mean well, but either report bugs clearly or don't mention it.

[garfield]

DaveBlake, I'm sorry if you have understood the mood of my post wrongly. English is not my mother's one and it seems while I assume I've chosen the correct words I'm just simply not. Sorry for that, and I hope the more I speak English the better it becomes.

In short - scrappers are disaster as no one who fulfills the scrapper's databases cares about quality of texts, tracklists and arts they provide. And when I want to disable this function I just don't even want to see its trails in the UI. Otherwise it is like storing the garbage in your pockets. But at the same time I clearly understand that the most users also don't care how their tracklists are formatted and the cover arts look.

As for the bugs, I thought you know every one I've noticed, also I thought this thread is not intended for the bug reports, but as you've asked, here is what I've noticed:

1. Boxsets sometimes could use random cover art for every disc or no cover art at all
   
2. Boxsets sometimes could ignore DISCSUBTITLE tag in case there is no cover art file for one of its discs (while all other have them) and name the discs just as Disc 1 and so on
   
3. In some cases a random disc in the boxset could also display the content of the other random disc from the same boxset. This can be healed only by deleting the database file and scanning the DB again.
   
4. Sometimes Boxset ignores the cover arts from its disc folders and display the default icon (the huge one) for video files for every one of its discs, it also requires to recreate the database
   
5. No DISCSUBTITLE for MP3 files. But this may be because MP3 just doesn't support this tag.
   
6. Deleting or renaming the album folder, or retagging its files doesn't remove this album from the Music DB and could offer old entries along with the new ones until the database is recreated.
   

And I'm still sure KODI must understand that different DISCSUBTITLE means different disc even in case the DISCNUMBER is not set at all. The DISCNUMBER tag should only help to sort the discs in the proper order but not just alphabetically. It is of course not a bug report but a feature request. ))

Also it is required to set the view for every Boxset instead of setting the default view just once.

[DaveBlake]

@garfield it is clear that you do not like the artist and album data created by the wider community, then as I said before simply set the default album and artist scrapers to Local Information. This means that Kodi will only use additional artist and album data provided by you via nfo files, should you choose to do so, or nothing at all.

But I think you are wrong in that in my experience that most music library users do care about how their music is organised and the cover art it shows.

So a quick check through your bug list.

6. Kodi is designed to work with removeable drives, hence it does not delete things from the library just because they are currently inaccessible. Hence on deleting or renaming files for folders, if you want to remove the related library entries then you need to go to system>settings>media>library and clean the music library. That removes entries where the media is not found.

5. For MP3 files the discsubtitle metadata is in TSST, tagging software may have it's own name for that but it is supported by the ID3 v2.4 format. In discussion I tend to use the FLAC/Vorbis tag name (DISCSUBTITLE), and users will need to interpret that with respect to the tools they use.

1 to 4 are all "sometimes" effects with art, and since I am not aware of any issues will need particulars to be able to reproduce. Art is also loaded in the background, so it could be that those times you are just too fast. I also have to suspect from the rest of discussion there could be some effects of renaming folders, odd tagging and not cleaning contributing.  If you can provide details of folders and files that can reproduce any issue then please do.