[gotham2014]

Hi,

I am somewhat lost. Trying to figure out where KODI is retrieving its music information from for this particular issue.

I have found that some artist names are stored online using non-english language which makes usage of it within a English based music library within Kodi pointless. For this reason I corrected these manually inside each songs mp3 file to make sure my local artist song information is in English.

But when I scan the mp3 into the Kodi library the non-english artists names suddenly appear.

I tried different things without success.

Made sure the option "Scan music tags" is enabled, "Use online information" and "download extra information during scan" disabled.

But still they appear.

Below an example for the song "Believe" using Kodi v17.6

See example song images here

Hope someone can point me to the right direction of resolve. :-)

[black_eagle]

What are you using to tag your files ?  Good tags are an essential part of getting an accurate music library.  I'd recommend using Musicbrainz Picard to do the tagging with.  It will add musicbrainz artist, album and track id's to your files which Kodi understands and has used since v16.

[Uatschitchun]

Musicbrainz has a setting to translate foreign language names to other languages. That needs to be set for your usecase.
Together with that you need to rescrape all appearances of that name (being it artist or some other role it appears), as it's written to the DB already.

[gotham2014]

What are you using to tag your files ?  Good tags are an essential part of getting an accurate music library.  I'd recommend using Musicbrainz Picard to do the tagging with.  It will add musicbrainz artist, album and track id's to your files which Kodi understands and has used since v16.

Hi @black_eagle and @Uatschitchun Thanks for your feedback. Yes all is true, however your remarks @black_eagle regarding musicbrianz made me remember something again. That NOT ALL MUSIC PROGRAMS DISPLAY OR USE THE SAME TAGS THAT ARE AVAILABLE IN THE MP3 FILE. 

Using musicbrainz I found the foreign artist names still present. so I changed these and all was well after new import.

So thanks for helping me remember. 

ps. I used musicbrainz for all the tagging and this imported the foreign language. I will check the translation option. Even though its a great program, doing 19k songs it still is far from perfect. It still screwed up full album imports and finding other albums to fill them into. Resulting in once complete albums to become partly filled.

[black_eagle]

Even though its a great program, doing 19k songs it still is far from perfect

Well, I have more than that!  You only need to do it once though, although I sometimes go through an artist at a time and make sure that they are all up-to-date.
 

It still screwed up full album imports and finding other albums to fill them into. Resulting in once complete albums to become partly filled.

Yeah sometimes it needs some user intervention or you need to pick the 'look up with browser' option to get the right album or drag stuff around.  I think there is a little bit of a learning curve with it because I used to experience a similar thing, but now I've used it for a few years it's not really a problem I ever see any more.  I make sure everything is right before I save it and that it is indeed the right album details that I'm tagging with.
 

NOT ALL MUSIC PROGRAMS DISPLAY OR USE THE SAME TAGS THAT ARE AVAILABLE IN THE MP3 FILE. 

True, but as my music is only played back via various Kodi instances it's all tagged with just Kodi in mind.

[gotham2014]

Even though its a great program, doing 19k songs it still is far from perfect

Well, I have more than that!  You only need to do it once though, although I sometimes go through an artist at a time and make sure that they are all up-to-date.
 

It still screwed up full album imports and finding other albums to fill them into. Resulting in once complete albums to become partly filled.

Yeah sometimes it needs some user intervention or you need to pick the 'look up with browser' option to get the right album or drag stuff around.  I think there is a little bit of a learning curve with it because I used to experience a similar thing, but now I've used it for a few years it's not really a problem I ever see any more.  I make sure everything is right before I save it and that it is indeed the right album details that I'm tagging with.
 

NOT ALL MUSIC PROGRAMS DISPLAY OR USE THE SAME TAGS THAT ARE AVAILABLE IN THE MP3 FILE. 

True, but as my music is only played back via various Kodi instances it's all tagged with just Kodi in mind. 

Thanks again

[black_eagle]

No problem.  I know tagging it all properly is a pain (I have done roughly 25k tracks) but in my opinion, it's worth it for the rich library experience that it gives.  It's also work remembering that Dave has stuff in the pipeline for Kodi to be able to read even more of the tags that MB provide and use those in Kodi.  I'm particularly looking forward to being able to use 'original release date' so that I can sort my albums into the correct date order.

Lots of improvements coming I think, when Dave has some free time to spend on coding them.

[gotham2014]

No problem.  I know tagging it all properly is a pain (I have done roughly 25k tracks) but in my opinion, it's worth it for the rich library experience that it gives.  It's also work remembering that Dave has stuff in the pipeline for Kodi to be able to read even more of the tags that MB provide and use those in Kodi.  I'm particularly looking forward to being able to use 'original release date' so that I can sort my albums into the correct date order.

Lots of improvements coming I think, when Dave has some free time to spend on coding them.

Sounds good.

I am waiting for the moment when you can edit albums in Kodi directly. E.g. if you find a song or album is incorrectly identified during initial scan, you can identify the correct one and import the data. Similar to how Emby used the identify option in the menu for movies and tv shows.

[DaveBlake]

I am waiting for the moment when you can edit albums in Kodi directly. E.g. if you find a song or album is incorrectly identified during initial scan, you can identify the correct one and import the data. Similar to how Emby used the identify option in the menu for movies and tv shows. 

You are going to have a long wait....

Video does not have tagging (well it does but it is new and not often used), hence the parsing file names and fetch data scraping approach (and edit the mistakes). Meanwhile music files did have a well established tagging standard and tagging software to help you edit that, so the music library is based on those tags. After 5 years of using Kodi I have finally started to try to use the video library (always used file view for video it was all I needed), and how I wish my media files came with correct idenitification in metadata, like music does, rather than have to coax the scraper to get the right TV show etc.

I know tagging is a pain, and what you really want is something to just look at the files and get all the right data from somewhere. Acoustic finger-printing has certainly been tried, but to my knowledge still is not up to the job and still human selection to identify things correctly is still needed (or at least to check automated choices). Also while title and year is usually enough to identify a movie or TV show, it is not enough for very many music releases.

There was an attempt (in v12 or 13) to have Kodi sync with changes to data at Musicbrainz providing that the original music files had mbid tags (so users still had to tag music accurately with Picard anyway), but it was never implemented fully and has been deprecated (almost).

There are good tools for music file tagging freely available e.g. Picard or Mp3tag. Kodi could be extended to wrap around those I guess, but it would need to edit the media files and that is something that many users do not want. They like a media player that just plays and does not do things to their precious media. Just editing music data in Kodi databases is futile, it is better done in a way that is available to all media players on all devices and over time (e.g. not lost if you reinstall). Hence held in music file metadata since there is an established standard for it.

If song or album is incorrectly identified then it is the music file that needs to change. IMO that is much easier done on a laptop with tagging software than on a 10ft UI - TV screen and remote.

... so a long wait.

[gotham2014]

I am waiting for the moment when you can edit albums in Kodi directly. E.g. if you find a song or album is incorrectly identified during initial scan, you can identify the correct one and import the data. Similar to how Emby used the identify option in the menu for movies and tv shows. 

You are going to have a long wait....

Video does not have tagging (well it does but it is new and not often used), hence the parsing file names and fetch data scraping approach (and edit the mistakes). Meanwhile music files did have a well established tagging standard and tagging software to help you edit that, so the music library is based on those tags. After 5 years of using Kodi I have finally started to try to use the video library (always used file view for video it was all I needed), and how I wish my media files came with correct idenitification in metadata, like music does, rather than have to coax the scraper to get the right TV show etc.

I know tagging is a pain, and what you really want is something to just look at the files and get all the right data from somewhere. Acoustic finger-printing has certainly been tried, but to my knowledge still is not up to the job and still human selection to identify things correctly is still needed (or at least to check automated choices). Also while title and year is usually enough to identify a movie or TV show, it is not enough for very many music releases.

There was an attempt (in v12 or 13) to have Kodi sync with changes to data at Musicbrainz providing that the original music files had mbid tags (so users still had to tag music accurately with Picard anyway), but it was never implemented fully and has been deprecated (almost).

There are good tools for music file tagging freely available e.g. Picard or Mp3tag. Kodi could be extended to wrap around those I guess, but it would need to edit the media files and that is something that many users do not want. They like a media player that just plays and does not do things to their precious media. Just editing music data in Kodi databases is futile, it is better done in a way that is available to all media players on all devices and over time (e.g. not lost if you reinstall). Hence held in music file metadata since there is an established standard for it.

If song or album is incorrectly identified then it is the music file that needs to change. IMO that is much easier done on a laptop with tagging software than on a 10ft UI - TV screen and remote.

... so a long wait. 

Yes, I guess holding my breath will be suicide. :-)

What I do for videos is use emby to scrape all. My experience with their setup is very successful. Only a handful where wrongly scraped. In a perfect world the best of emby and Kodi would be fused together to make one awesome product. Now we have to do with mixing the two separately to come to the best outcome.

[DaveBlake]

Yeap, regcognising a movie or TV show from name and year (something that is easy to use for a folder name) works most of the time. Scraper addon improvements are being made for Kodi  for v19 too. I have never been clear on what Embry does for video that Kodi doesn't, perhaps something for a thread in a different subforum.

But music.... well to get near to identifying an album at very least you need album title, year, and album artist(s) but often other details too because there are multiple releases from different contries, on different labels, with different tracks. I don't want to make folder/file names from all that, and for genres like classical music it would be impossible. Then there are the users that don't work with whole albums but prefer a personalised selection of tracks. That leaves an audio-fingerprint approach that samples each file and compares it to a resource of that data, but that is going to slower than parsing a folder name.

I know the dream - just point "Super" Kodi at a drive (or drives) of mixed media files and magically it sorts it all out, fetches all the amazing art and factual information about the media and related artists etc., then offers it to you in a variety of visually rich and flexible ways so you can choose what to watch/listen to or expore like a personalised media encylopedia. Maybe one day....

[gotham2014]

Yeap, regcognising a movie or TV show from name and year (something that is easy to use for a folder name) works most of the time. Scraper addon improvements are being made for Kodi  for v19 too. I have never been clear on what Embry does for video that Kodi doesn't, perhaps something for a thread in a different subforum.

But music.... well to get near to identifying an album at very least you need album title, year, and album artist(s) but often other details too because there are multiple releases from different contries, on different labels, with different tracks. I don't want to make folder/file names from all that, and for genres like classical music it would be impossible. Then there are the users that don't work with whole albums but prefer a personalised selection of tracks. That leaves an audio-fingerprint approach that samples each file and compares it to a resource of that data, but that is going to slower than parsing a folder name.

I know the dream - just point "Super" Kodi at a drive (or drives) of mixed media files and magically it sorts it all out, fetches all the amazing art and factual information about the media and related artists etc., then offers it to you in a variety of visually rich and flexible ways so you can choose what to watch/listen to or expore like a personalised media encylopedia. Maybe one day....

The video settings as some additional functionalities like easier way of editing movie information if its wrong. Its also a combination of ease of use and functionally available. See, Emby will allow you to manage your media library easier through its web interface, however it looses on the presentation side of things. This is where Kodi comes in as it has a much better presentation side, but than looses on the ease of managing your media library. One additional advantage is that emby also is a personal streaming service that you can access all over the world to watch your files on any computer or tablet/phone.

As for music... well its very easy to just give available search options based on the information in the mp3 as tags or file name, than select the one you think has the correct information you need and let it overwrite the file tags and library. This would help me to quickly update a song or album once I see its wrong while playing it. Otherwise I need to remember myself to go to the computer and update it through other 3rd party software. Usually you are doing other things, and a quick fix on Kodi itself is an easy compromise not having to drop what your doing completely.

Unfortunately I don't think that this will ever happen for the simple reason that man is flawed so anything it creates is per definition flawed in nature. If you can already see the language issues in a couple of songs I pointed out before, this already broke super Kodi from being super. :-)

Have a nice evening.

[scott967]

I'd just be happy if musicvideo album node could display the album art from the music library (if available) like it does for artist node.

For artist name, MB says it is the artist's "official name" i.e., if artist is Russian most likely in Cyrillic script (example:  Пётр Ильич Чайковский).  You have the option of using "artist sortname" as a way to capture English trans-literation eg "Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich" (But, this is not "MB-approved" so you have to hand-enter AFAIK).  Ideally there would be an ability to use artist alias names.  Alternatively set the English as an artist credit and use "artists" tag to link to the artist MBID in the library (in this case, though, library artist node does not show the credit as an entry).  The addition of artist alias in the library would allow the possibility to list these variant names in the library artist node.

scott s.
.

[Uatschitchun]

The metadata translate setting in picard is using aliases!?
picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/options/#metadata

[scott967]

The metadata translate setting in picard is using aliases!?
picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/options/#metadata

I don't use Picard, but I believe that is the case.  But even though the style guide says sortname is Latin script, I don't believe that is currently the case in general.  I have seen discussion that for Japanese for example, the sort name is in the Kana reading which I understand is the normal practice in Japan.  And in fact if you look at the MB style guide entry on sort name it shows '布袋寅泰‎ has sort name "Hotei, Tomoyasu"' as an example, but if you actually look at 布袋寅泰‎ in MB database it shows for the primary artist name 布袋寅泰‎ the sortname of ほていともやす.

scott s.
.