[Karellen]

Why would I need to ''re-tag''?

You stated " I have the 400 cd's all lined up on my desk - again ;-)" which to me indicated you are re-ripping your cd collection. If you are re-ripping, then you need to tag your music files. It has already been recommended that you tag using MusicBrainz Picard and I offered you information for two settings that you should have in the software.

Are you ripping your cd? Are you not tagging them?

[pootler]

Why would I need to ''re-tag''?

You stated " I have the 400 cd's all lined up on my desk - again ;-)" which to me indicated you are re-ripping your cd collection. If you are re-ripping, then you need to tag your music files. It has already been recommended that you tag using MusicBrainz Picard and I offered you information for two settings that you should have in the software.

Are you ripping your cd? Are you not tagging them? 

Hi Karellan -  lower the temperature please

My humour is dry - not malicious :-)
I am re-ripping all my collection to FLAC - correct.
I have done this several times in the past, but as explained I rather stupidly decided to rip to .wav last time, and kodi does not seem to see any  data in that format.
So....That is all I am doing?
When I have finished all the ripping, I will get Kodi to scan everything, and all will be well again.
I can only assume when you say ''re-tag' is when Kodi misses info on some of the cd's- is that what you mean?
I have only ever needed to find the occasional missing cover art.

Sorry - but am I missing something after all these years:-)

Thanks

[DaveBlake]

"Ripping a CD" does not imply any tagging (embedding of metadata), some rippers do minimal tagging at the same time but most  users will rip to mp3 or FLAC and then use a separate tool to fully tag the resulting files. That is what @Karellen has advised you on.  Maybe you do more, but if the average user posting here said that they ripped their music but can't se it in the library it would be because they had not added tags.

And after all these years of using Kodi you turn around and rip to wav then yes you probably are missing something.

[pootler]

"Ripping a CD" does not imply any tagging (embedding of metadata), some rippers do minimal tagging at the same time but most  users will rip to mp3 or FLAC and then use a separate tool to fully tag the resulting files. That is what @Karellen has advised you on.  Maybe you do more, but if the average user posting here said that they ripped their music but can't se it in the library it would be because they had not added tags.

And after all these years of using Kodi you turn around and rip to wav then yes you probably are missing something.

Blimey.

I am always surprised at how quickly these forum threads can go sour.

READ MY FIRST POST PLEASE

RIPPED WITH KODI

TAGGED WITH KODI

And next , before jumping in with venom, remember you will get a much better response with POLITENESS.

Jeez

[scott967]

In eac I bought the lifetime license for the GD3 database and it actually is pretty complete, but only hits the major tag fields like title, album, artist, track#.  But once you have those any other tagging software should be able to add the missing pieces.

scott s.
.

[Karellen]

I am always surprised at how quickly these forum threads can go sour.

Sorry, but you are the one that is becoming sour. We are passing on information to assist you, but somehow you are becoming offended and taking our advice as some sort of disrespect. That is not the case.

Ripping is not tagging. They are two separate steps. As scott967 has stated, ripping software "may" include minimal tags which are then used by the tagging software to more easily find the information to fully tag your music files.

[Klojum]

How about keeping a copy of all the ripped files from your 400 CDs, so you can experiment on what works best in terms of file tagging?
You won't need to go through all the ripping again (and again) should something go sour during file tagging. Just my 0.02c .

[DaveBlake]

Blimey.

I am always surprised at how quickly these forum threads can go sour.

No idea why that is your response to me, no sourness here. No idea why you think I am impolite.

RIPPED WITH KODI
TAGGED WITH KODI

Kodi has a deprecated (and needs to be dropped totally IMO) minimal rip facility that few users now use. Best advice use some other software to rip CDs. Kodi does minimally tag when it rips, the only time it writes to music files, but again deprecated and does not support the rich functionality Kodi can now offer. Best advice tag your music files using tagging software like Picard.

Rip with something else. Tag with sonthing else. Use Kodi as music library and player.
You really are missing stuff.

[FXB78]

For what it's worth I use Windows Media Player to rip (works surprisingly well) and mp3tag to quickly tag the files. There may be a better way but that works for me

[DaveBlake]

Better ways to rip - EAC, it  uses accurip database so you can check the results against those ripped by other users
Better ways to tag - Musicbrainz Picard or Mp3tag.

[FXB78]

Better ways to rip - EAC, it  uses accurip database so you can check the results against those ripped by other users
Better ways to tag - Musicbrainz Picard or Mp3tag.

I just had a look at EAC and it looks very familiar, I'm sure I used it many years ago. Will download and have a closer look at it, thanks.

[the_other_guy]

For what it's worth I use Windows Media Player to rip (works surprisingly well) and mp3tag to quickly tag the files. There may be a better way but that works for me

i find that the tagging for Windows Media Player now come from xbox and is better then MusicBrainz Picard.

MusicBrainz Picard. will screw up any recording taken from old audio tapes you can have them tagged Picard. will mark them as untaged

you could try networking to windows and use Media Player to retag them

[black_eagle]

MusicBrainz Picard. will screw up any recording taken from old audio tapes you can have them tagged Picard. will mark them as untaged

Picard will only do what you tell it to when you hit 'save'.  I don't know about you, but unless the disc icon goes gold (to indicate the album is complete) I don't just blindly accept what Picard is telling me but check that what is in the tags is what I actually want.  There is also a setting in Picard where you can list any tags that you want to preserve from being removed or overwritten by MB data.

 @pootler What people are trying to convey is that Kodi reads an awful lot more tags than it can write. Those tags are read when Kodi scans in your music and the information in them is used to build the music library. The more accurate your tagging and the more complete it is, the better your library will be. A small example would be the boxset feature in v19. Kodi won't write out the required tag (disc subtitle) to your files in order to be able to automatically determine which albums are box sets when it scans them in. The other tagging programs will and if you have any such sets they will magically appear in the boxset node in v19.

That's just one example of how Kodi uses just one tag but there are many tags that Kodi can read (v19 reads more than v18.x) and uses in various different ways in the library. Good tagging is not essential, Kodi will work with a minimal set of tags but like most things, the more effort you put in at the beginning, the better the reward at the end.