[dubwat]

Hi,
Is MyRating [POPM] written to the music file ID3 tags or to the Kodi MyMusic database?  Or both?  I.E., The database reads the ID3 POPM tag into the database.

Longer version.  I have a kodi box (vero 4K+) connected to an external hard drive with my music on it.  I've pretty much moved over to kodi but I still have a Win10 music manager (MusicBee) pointing at the kodi/external hard drive over the network.  New music files normally start on the Win10 machine where I put them though Muiscbrainz Picard, volume analysis, album art etc.  Then I play & rate them on the Win10 machine and finally move them over to Kodi.  I thought why play them on crappy computer speakers when I have (the excellent) Kodi sitting there waiting...  So, as an experiment, I tried to rate them on kodi/extHD and then have Win10 MusicBee scan them for the POPM tag.  MusicBee can't read Kodi's database but maybe MusicBee would pick up the MyRating [POPM] tag from file metadata and scan it into the MusicBee manager.  It didn't work.

Anyways, not Kodi's problem I hear you say!  But that led me to wonder if my music metadata is fully exportable.  If for whatever reason, me, my music & Kodi parted company, would I be able to take my metadata with me?  Hence my question whether the POPM tag is written into the music file or into the kodi database.

I've probably gotten things wrong completely (as usual) so thanks in advance for any insights 

& Happy Christmas.



P.S.  As an aside, I can get Playcount [PCNT] to go from Kodi to Last.fm to MusicBee.  It's not retrospective/historical though.

[Karellen]

Kodi cannot write music file tags. Any new or updated information is saved to the database.

To export the database, see the link in my signature below.

[dubwat]

Kodi cannot write music file tags. Any new or updated information is saved to the database.

Ah!  I did not realise that.  Thank you

[dubwat]

To export the database, see the link in my signature below.

@Karellen (& the Kodi team) are geniuses!

https://kodi.wiki/view/Import-export_lib...sic#Export
Choose 'Export as a single file' & Items to Export = Songs

Songs
Will export song rating and history information. This includes:
User rating
Scraped rating and votes
Last played and play count

Thanks again!

[jjd-uk]

Yep we do it that way to avoid messing with people's media files, as doing so would risk something going wrong and accidentally trashing the media files.

[dubwat]

@jjd-uk Thanks.  I realised that once I thought about it.  Sometimes I need to be 'banged on the head' to see the obvious!

Re the export option mentioned above, I spotted a potential flaw (for me).  I looked at the exported files and saw that the metadata is saved for kodi only;

<userrating max="10">8</userrating>

This is fine for a kodi re-install but it's not correct for the 0-255 scale used by the ID3* POPM tag (says the novice).  But one thing I learned from my work/business life is that before you step into a deal you should always think about how to step out of the deal.  I realise this is not Kodi's problem but, assuming the worst, how would I leave Kodi and take my metadata with me?

I'm probably an outlier for a Kodi user but, the past few months, I've really enjoyed using Kodi for music.  Many nights, I've listened to music instead of switching to a TV show or movie.  The historical metadata is important to me because, e.g., you can set up smart playlists like 'what is my favourite pop song' or 'what rock music have I not listened to in the past 6 months'.  If the worst happened & I left Kodi, I've have to start again.  Again, strictly speaking, this is not Kodi's problem.

I've been really impressed with Kodi and my plan/project for 2020 was to move things to a NAS/MySQL database (still researching), have a few Kodi boxes around the house, & have consolidated metadata.



P.S. Is 'userrating' or 'MyRating' the correct term to use when talking about [POPM]?

[black_eagle]

how would I leave Kodi and take my metadata with me?

So, that data is taken from the tags so would still be embedded in your files.

P.S. Is 'userrating' or 'MyRating' the correct term to use when talking about [POPM]?

Userrating is correct.  That is the field in Kodi's db that is populated from the POPM tag.  There is also another rating field (simply called 'rating') in the db.  I think that gets populated by the scraper(s). You can sort by it but that seems to be the only way to display the value of that field.  'MyRating' is the name used by Kodi for the userrating field, certainly when sorting.  This can be edited via the GUI but that only changes the value in the db, NOT in the tags.

HTH

[scott967]

In general the problem is that POPM is kind of a kludge, and that's just for ID3 tags.  When you add in other tag formats it's a mess.  Kodi tries to interpret POPM in an intelligent manner and do its best to convert the value to a comparable number in the scale 0-10 (typically shown in UI with the granularity of "half-stars").  So if you tag a music file with "5 stars" in some software it should show as "5 stars" in Kodi as a "rating".  This is not the "userrating" which is set using the UI.

I think there may be some issues (I don't set the POPM myself in files) where iTunes might assign an average of album song ratings to songs that have not been explicitly rated.

scott s.
.