2020-01-19, 00:36
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.
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.