v19 Multiple releases of the same album.
#1
Hi guys, what is the best approach for adding several versions of the same album to kodi v19?

Adding CD version vinyl, hi-res and multi-channel etcetera etcetera of the same album.

Up till now I have just taged my albums with picard and had slightly different artwork to see the difference of the vinyl and CD version. But it gets messy very quickly.

I have tried the newer feature making them "boxsets", remove the musicbrainz tags and set DISCSUBTITLE tag for flac and SETSUBTITLE for mp3. This works. And cleans up the mess very good.

I guess ideal would be to have some kind of musicbrainz releasegroup kinda thing, but there is no plans for that?

So is boxsets feature the way to go or is there a better way?
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#2
Kodi provides support for having multiple releases of the same album by processing Musicbrainz Release ID tags, so tagging with the correct release in Picard is what I would call the best approach.

But you say this "gets messy very quickly", what is messy about it? Is it that you can't see the difference between releases easily? Different art is not the only approach there, you also have album type that can hold whatever data you like and used for playlists etc.

Or is it that you only want to see each album title once, i.e. what Musicbrainz call the release group, and then drill down to pick what version to play? Since having multiple versions of an album in your library is a niche thing, no there are no plans to add some kind of musicbrainz releasegroup kinda thing (although the library does hold the release group mbid, uses it for scraping additional information).

The only other suggestion I have, different from your suggestions, is to locate the different versions of an album on different music sources e.g. all the vinyl in a folder, all the hi-res in another etc. Then when filtering by source you can see only one kind of release, or not fitering see them all.

It really all depends on what it is you are trying to achieve.
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#3
Thank you for your post.
And sorry for my poor choice of words with "messy" I meant that some artists gets overpopulated with many releases. When I browse through standard artistnode without any filtering. Which is what I do must of the time in Kodi music

Yes, I only want to see one entry for every album title. So I guess the boxset thing is the best way to go for me.

Again, thank you !
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#4
I'm also facing this challenge and have the respective albums tagged to my needs. One approach would be to show both original release date and re-release date ... that would help in identifying and differentiating releases for the knowledgeable owner in the album overview (although not in my case because I insist that "date" should always be populated with the original release date and I read the re-release date from DISCOGS_RELEASED. That is the opposite philosophy of how musicbrainz operates. Unfortunately, the Kodi option to optionally read the date from the musicbrainz tag ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE does nothing for me).

Even better would be for the album overview to show some additional, freely user selectable, metadata, like "MEDIA" or "DISCOGS_FORMAT" (both of which could show "vinyl/LP", for example).

However, for all of that a music skin would probably be the way to go since the data is already in the database and just needs to be presented in a way a music "otaku" would cherish. Maybe one day it will be possible for the user to freely select tags from the database and assign them to show in the frontend, like a user skin.
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#5
Thank you @HeresJohnny for your post and intersting thoughts.

I decided to make "boxsets" for the albums where I have the most releases and artists that have released many albums. Otherwise I will let the multiple releases of albums stack with musicbrainz separation.

Maybe some time in the future we will have a better solution for this, but this will do fine for now.
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#6
I just tag them differently as a quick and dirty workaround. It seems to work ok in Kodi I should get around to tagging them based on the correct release which is what I do recently but I’ve got many rips I did years ago but I don’t have time or inclination to fix when Kodi is happy.
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#7
(2021-05-06, 11:49)HomerJau Wrote: I just tag them differently as a quick and dirty workaround.

So for example:
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
Becomes
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon SACD
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon CD?

That will of course work to. But that seems to dirty for me.
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#8
I’m collector of multichannel release and I’ve got versions:

Dark Side of the Moon:
Quad BDA
Quad LP 
5.1 BDA
5.1 SACD
Fan Mix

(I don’t have a stereo version in Kodi). At least with the dirty tagging I can see version I want to play.

Some albums I have now in Atmos or remixed by different engineers and it’s important to me to know and find which one.I’m not going to see that easily in Kodi without tagging it into the album name.
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#9
Yea, good example and impressive collection. I can see the problem with the engineers. I think you to could benefit from making them boxsets.
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#10
Seems we're not so niche after all ;-)
But seriously, if you remove musicbrainz ALBUMID and just leave the RELEASEGROUPID you'll be able to stack different releases under one single album entry. Drawback is, you need to further fiddle with discnumbers because duplicate ones will cancel each other out or lead to other unexpected results.
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#11
Kodi added support for displaying ‘discs’ recently. I guess tagging with a different Disc Number would split up albums with identical album name tag but I’m not sure is ‘discs’ can be names (e.g. ‘SACD’, ‘Quad Alan Parson’s mix’ etc). That would be nice!
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#12
(2021-05-06, 23:22)HeresJohnny Wrote: Seems we're not so niche after all ;-)
But seriously, if you remove musicbrainz ALBUMID and just leave the RELEASEGROUPID you'll be able to stack different releases under one single album entry.
Haha no maybe not. And thank you, I didn't know that. I will try that asap.
(2021-05-06, 23:28)HomerJau Wrote: Kodi added support for displaying ‘discs’ recently. I guess tagging with a different Disc Number would split up albums with identical album name tag but I’m not sure is ‘discs’ can be names (e.g. ‘SACD’, ‘Quad Alan Parson’s mix’ etc). That would be nice!
They can, i used Tagscanner and added tag DISCSUBTITLE for flac and different disc number.
E.g disc 5 with DISCSUBTITLE: SACD’, ‘Quad Alan Parson’s mix
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#13
Excellent news on the DiscSubtitle tag!

I’ll give it a go soon.

Thanks
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#14
(2021-05-06, 23:28)HomerJau Wrote: but I’m not sure is ‘discs’ can be names (e.g. ‘SACD’, ‘Quad Alan Parson’s mix’ etc). That would be nice!

Yes, discs have names.  In fact, the boxset feature relies on this.  You can also group discs together in a set by naming them the same.  Means that if you are (ab)using sets in this way, if you have a double/triple CD that you want to include in a set, if you name all three discs exactly the same (but with different disc numbers), Kodi will display that as one entry which when opened will contain all the tracks off all three discs.  I wrote it this way so I could split up my 18CD set of Pink Floyds 'A tree full of Secrets) into 'Volume One', "Volume Two" etc, with each volume containing two discs.

Anyway, I'm not so sure that this is actually as niche as @DaveBlake might think these days.  I've certainly got multiple releases of quite a few albums, although having them entered several times means I can keep track of which ones I am still missing etc.  Still, I can see a case for selecting say Marillion's 'Misplaced Childhood' and then seeing the original release, the double CD re-release and the 4 CD boxset and choosing then which to listen to.

A lot of my stuff is split up with various nodes anyway, so f.e. 5.1 stuff is in it's own node.  Hi-res, quad etc is also split like that but that doesn't work so well for browsing by artist unless you start setting up nodes for artists with 5.1 etc.  Maybe it's worth looking at when I get some spare time!
Learning Linux the hard way !!
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#15
Truely excellent work @black_eagle Well done!

Nice to hear there’s some multichannel fans here too!
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