[antisuck]

Apologies in advance, I know this is long.

I've been using Kodi for many years, and have got everything working pretty much to my liking.  Almost entirely flac, all of it in the recommended Artist/Album directory structure.  A substantial part of my collection includes surround releases on DVD-A and Blu-Ray, remixed re-releases, MFSL remasters, etc, and so I'm in the habit of manually editing Album tags like so:

[Yes]
Fragile
Fragile (Steven Wilson 5.1 mix)
Fragile (Steven Wilson stereo mix)
Fragile (High Vibration SACD box set)
etc.

Kodi has never handled box sets very well (that appears to be changing though!), so I break everything up into individual albums with discrete names for my own convenience as you can see.

Another part of the equation is that a few years ago I migrated my collection to a NAS, and in preparation exported my music library to individual album.nfo files.  This all went pretty smoothly, somewhat to my surprise.

As my collection grows and I refine my tagging, however, the fact that the .nfo files redundantly stored EVERYTHING is turning into a big problem.  Basic data like Album and Year must be edited in multiple places and kept perfectly in sync, or it's a mess.  God help me if there is also a .cue file lingering in the folder or even embedded in a FLAC (I think I've pretty much nuked those, but I remain diligent).

To make it even more complicated, the vast majority of my library was built at a time when AllMusic allowed their album reviews to be scraped, so all these .nfo files that I have come to hate also contain unique and useful <review></review> info that will be a pain in the rear to get again.  Also my preferred skin wants a track listing with run times in the .nfo file in order to display that in the album information screen.  So I'm not willing to just nuke the .nfo files.

Looking to the future, I think I need to start over with proper MusicBrainz tags and .nfo files that don't hold redundant tag data.  I still absolutely intend to edit Album names after the fact, in order to quickly and easily distinguish between all the various releases and re-releases of all my classic rock.  This is currently non-negotiable until such time as we can alter the displayed name of albums like we can with movies.

So I'm not going to use Picard.  I'm a control freak, I've been using mp3tag for decades (which now scrapes MusicBrainz quite nicely), and I've made an export template for mp3tag that creates tidy album.nfo files with as much (or as little) info as required. Even so it's still going to be a manual process, as I'll need to copy the text of the album review from each old .nfo, then paste into the new one.

From what I can tell, if one's files are fully and correctly tagged, there is very little really *needed* in album.nfo, and that's only if you want your skin displaying things like a track list and review in an extended info screen.  I propose to export files that contain only the album name, a review, and a track listing with run times.  That's it.  The Musicbrainz release group id, artist ids etc will all be in the tags.

- Is there something I'm missing here?

- Would it be a really bad idea to add a nonstandard tag of my own devising to hold a paragraph of album review text in each FLAC file, in case something breaks and I need to do this again down the line?

- Any downside to subverting the RELEASETYPE tag to contain things like "bluray", "sacd", "surround" for filtering purposes?  I gather GENRE and the ever-popular COMMENT are often abused for this type of purpose, but I rather like the idea of using a tag that the player will never display.

- Any other thoughts?

Thanks for reading.

[HomerJau]

I’ve got a similar passion of hires and surround music. Kodi Music now supports filtering by Source and I’ve taken advantage of that by separating my music library into three source (root) folders: Surround, Up-mixes and Stereo.

I haven’t been all that interested in sorting/filtering on anything else (e.g. release type) but I’d probably use it at some stage.

I do like to view my surround music by type: Quad and Atmos. I’ve done that by adding the key word to the album folder name and I’ve created menu nodes to show just those albums that have the word in the path. That works ok.

Edit: I also add DVDA, SACD, BDA etc to the album folder name (and to album tags most of the time). I did a mod to Aeon Nox Silvo to display the original release type, BDA, DVDA, SACD, DTS-CD etc

See this post:
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...pid2906235

I’ve not found any good reason to tag files with Musicbrainz album and track data. Maybe someone could tell me what that adds?

I do add an artist.nfo file that contains MusicBranzID as that allows ArtistSlideShow to get the correct artist fanart images where artist names are similar. I have also tagged MusicbrainzArtistIDs (I think) for some albums. I was doing that for quite a while but not bothered recently, no issues as yet.

BTW: My library isn’t too big, probably 2000 albums. I’ve also got about 250 concerts in the Kodi music video library but that’s all done with nfo files as tagging isn’t yet supported.

[black_eagle]

I’ve not found any good reason to tag files with Musicbrainz album and track data. Maybe someone could tell me what that adds?

From the Wiki :

The advantages of tagging with MusicBrainz are:
They allow you to have different artists with the same name in your library e.g. "John Williams" the classical guitarist and "John Williams" the film music composer and conductor.
They negate inconsistencies in artist naming e.g. having "Peter Tchaikovsky" on some albums and "Piotr Czajkowski" on others
They allow you to have more than one release of an album in your library e.g. the normal and deluxe editions of an album
They clearly identify the artist and album in ways that names alone can not. This can then be used to accurately scrape additional artist and album information and locate the correct artwork

 

- Would it be a really bad idea to add a nonstandard tag of my own devising to hold a paragraph of album review text in each FLAC file, in case something breaks and I need to do this again down the line?

Can't think of a reason why it's a bad idea as long as you don't mind your files getting even bigger! Vorbis has a DESCRIPTION tag that might do nicely for an album review. Kodi doesn't read that tag (currently anyway) so it will just ignore it. The COMMENT tag though is read and stored on a track by track basis (I use it for track reviews and/or details about a specific track).

- Any downside to subverting the RELEASETYPE tag to contain things like "bluray", "sacd", "surround" for filtering purposes?

No. I've already abused it in any case when adding the boxset feature! It was decided to use that tag as a means of forcing an album to be flagged as a boxset if it didn't otherwise meet the 'rules'. EG, you can set RELEASETYPE to contain Boxset to make a twin disc album or a 5 disc compilation album into a boxset which would otherwise not happen. Kodi is only looking for certain values in that tag and should just ignore any others in there. Skins do display what's in that tag though. Certainly Estuary and Confluence both do in the album info dialog. It'll probably look OK though as it'll display something like TYPE: Album ; SACD

Any particular reason for not using Picard as you are going to be using MB's data anyway ?  You can edit tags in Picard easily enough although I don't think you can get it to do the .nfo export.  I'd suggest that if you are using something different that you do a small test with just a few albums to start with and make sure everything is as expected.  The vast majority of issues with the music library are down to tagging issues, so best to just make sure first.

Pro Tip:  Run a copy of Kodi in portable mode whilst you are testing.  This will allow you to check everything is how you want it without affecting your main installation.  More info on how to do this at https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Ko...table_Mode  (Although the wiki says it's windows only, you can also run Kodi in portable mode on Linux if you need to).

[antisuck]

I’ve got a similar passion of hires and surround music. Kodi Music now supports filtering by Source and I’ve taken advantage of that by separating my music library into three source (root) folders: Surround, Up-mixes and Stereo.

I had a separate source for Surround at one point and filtered with smart playlists using "path contains", abandoned it due to OCD more than anything. Perhaps it's worth revisiting in conjunction with custom library nodes.

I do like to view my surround music by type: Quad and Atmos. I’ve done that by adding the key word to the album folder name and I’ve created menu nodes to show just those albums that have the word in the path. That works ok.

That makes sense as I'm already naming the albums that way.

Edit: I also add DVDA, SACD, BDA etc to the album folder name (and to album tags most of the time). I did a mod to Aeon Nox Silvo to display the original release type, BDA, DVDA, SACD, DTS-CD etc

See this post:
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...pid2906235

Nice work!

Can't think of a reason why it's a bad idea as long as you don't mind your files getting even bigger! Vorbis has a DESCRIPTION tag that might do nicely for an album review. Kodi doesn't read that tag (currently anyway) so it will just ignore it. The COMMENT tag though is read and stored on a track by track basis (I use it for track reviews and/or details about a specific track).

Good to know about DESCRIPTION, thanks.

No. I've already abused it in any case when adding the boxset feature! It was decided to use that tag as a means of forcing an album to be flagged as a boxset if it didn't otherwise meet the 'rules'. EG, you can set RELEASETYPE to contain Boxset to make a twin disc album or a 5 disc compilation album into a boxset which would otherwise not happen. Kodi is only looking for certain values in that tag and should just ignore any others in there. Skins do display what's in that tag though. Certainly Estuary and Confluence both do in the album info dialog. It'll probably look OK though as it'll display something like TYPE: Album ; SACD

The work you're doing on boxsets is much appreciated, and reading the thread is what nudged me in the direction of using RELEASETYPE. I'll probably carry on that way, assuming boxsets isn't going to be bothered by extra tag data with separators as needed.

Any particular reason for not using Picard as you are going to be using MB's data anyway ?  You can edit tags in Picard easily enough although I don't think you can get it to do the .nfo export.

It's going to be a time-consuming manual project what with trying to preserve the reviews by copying and pasting, so I'd rather do it all from a single interface if at all possible. Exporting the .nfo files is a biggy. I also like that as a final step I can "play" the album from mp3tag, which on my system starts up Foobar, allowing me to scan and write replaygain tags on the normal vanilla albums.

I'd suggest that if you are using something different that you do a small test with just a few albums to start with and make sure everything is as expected.  The vast majority of issues with the music library are down to tagging issues, so best to just make sure first.

Pro Tip:  Run a copy of Kodi in portable mode whilst you are testing.  This will allow you to check everything is how you want it without affecting your main installation.  More info on how to do this at https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Ko...table_Mode  (Although the wiki says it's windows only, you can also run Kodi in portable mode on Linux if you need to). 

Solid advice, thanks.

And thanks to both of you for helping me think this through. Much appreciated.