Posts: 80
Joined: Feb 2019
Reputation:
9
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?
Posts: 4,545
Joined: Jun 2015
Reputation:
269
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.
Posts: 80
Joined: Feb 2019
Reputation:
9
2021-05-03, 18:29
(This post was last modified: 2021-05-03, 18:36 by Sylfest.)
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 !
Posts: 1,234
Joined: Mar 2011
Reputation:
80
2021-05-06, 01:23
(This post was last modified: 2021-05-06, 01:28 by HeresJohnny.)
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.
Posts: 720
Joined: Nov 2014
Reputation:
57
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.
Posts: 720
Joined: Nov 2014
Reputation:
57
2021-05-06, 20:20
(This post was last modified: 2021-05-06, 20:21 by HomerJau.)
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.
Posts: 80
Joined: Feb 2019
Reputation:
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.
Posts: 1,234
Joined: Mar 2011
Reputation:
80
2021-05-06, 23:22
(This post was last modified: 2021-05-06, 23:51 by HeresJohnny.)
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.
Posts: 720
Joined: Nov 2014
Reputation:
57
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!
Posts: 720
Joined: Nov 2014
Reputation:
57
Excellent news on the DiscSubtitle tag!
I’ll give it a go soon.
Thanks