My music library is fairly substantial. These days I do not tend to add much music to it, but occasionally I may buy a CD or two from charity shops and the like. Is it good practice to put newly ripped albums into a folder and scan just that folder rather than rescanning the whole library. This seemed to work well for me when I was using V14 Gotham or V16 Jarvis. I now use V18 Leia. I used to notice that a rescan of the whole library used to take quite a time even if only a few albums had been added, so I tried adding a folder with just the new albums and scanning just that folder in. Is there a downside to doing this or is there a "best practice method" to follow?
2020-11-16, 15:53
If you just do "update library" then Kodi does a superficial check of all subfolders looking for changes. This does not read tags just looks at a hash of timestamp and size, but on a large music collecton over a LAN or on a slower drive even this can take some time. It reads the tags from the files in any folder it detects have having changed. Also on some systems clock change can fool this hash check that things have changed when they have not and a trigger a deeper full file rescan reading tags.
When you are just adding a few newly ripped albums I would advise you to use the facility in v18 and above to scan specific folders. In fileview mode navigate within the chosen music source down to the new album folder and from the context menu pick "Scan item to library", since it is new it does not matter how you answer the "Do full tag scan...?" dialog that pops up. I would do this per album folder, having added albums under my existing artist or genre (or whatever human way you organise your music sources) folder hierarchy. However you could also at a higher level on the folder layout if you happen to add the music in that way
Not so much about "best practice", no harm is done by a library update scan it is easy to start and runs in the background. But if you want to listen to new stuff immediately it ican be convenient to get things into the library even faster but just requires a few more clicks with the TV remote.
Happy listening.
When you are just adding a few newly ripped albums I would advise you to use the facility in v18 and above to scan specific folders. In fileview mode navigate within the chosen music source down to the new album folder and from the context menu pick "Scan item to library", since it is new it does not matter how you answer the "Do full tag scan...?" dialog that pops up. I would do this per album folder, having added albums under my existing artist or genre (or whatever human way you organise your music sources) folder hierarchy. However you could also at a higher level on the folder layout if you happen to add the music in that way
Not so much about "best practice", no harm is done by a library update scan it is easy to start and runs in the background. But if you want to listen to new stuff immediately it ican be convenient to get things into the library even faster but just requires a few more clicks with the TV remote.
Happy listening.
