[HomerJau]

The next Music Media Helper version has some new tools and functionality to help better support getting Kodi music video concerts into the Kodi music library and User Interface with minimal effort:

Edit now released:

Version 4.2.1 (May 26 2021)
-------------
New Features:
Split & Join MKV files: Now supports batch Merging of MKV and MKA files, chapter generation & CUE creation
Batch Creation Tools: Added recursive auto Creation of CUE files for Kodi Music Video folders
Batch Creation Tools: Added recursive auto Check for CUE creation Kodi Music Video folders
Split & Rename Concerts tool: Added option to export to MP4 (tagging supported)
Chapter Editor: Added support for MP4
Extract Audio from MKV tool: Now supports converting multiple M4A files to MKA and FLAC
 
Changes:
Edit Chapters in MKV tool renamed to 'Chapter Editor' (now supports MP4 chapters)
Improvements to tagging workflow in Split & Rename concerts
Extract Audio from MKV tool: Last Output type is set on opening the tool
Chapter Editor: Attempts to load Artist and Album (or Concert) name from existing NFO or folder name
Chapter Editor: Add track artist supports where track artist not same as album artist - new
Track Name Editor, Rename & Tag tool etc: Added Unicode support when pasting from a website
MMH: Added unicode support for CUE and NFO files
Updated mkvtoolnix components
Updated PDF docs


The new batch CUE creation tool is super fast and working now. Recursive scanning of all sub folders in your Kodi music video library will create a CUE for the video files every folder.

That’s going to allow users to simply add their existing Kodi music video source folder as a new Kodi music source, scan in Kodi music and all the videos will appear in the music library and Kodi music UI as shown in the OP of this thread. This won't damage your music database. If you don't like what you get, delete the new concert music source (from Kodi Settings, Media, Music) and clean. All the music videos are removed and you a back to before you tried this.

New Batch Creating CUE Files:
The new MMH Batch CUE tool (in 'Batch Creation Tools') supports creation of:

• A single CUE file for multiple MKV or MP4 files in a single folder
  
• A single CUE file for a single MKV or MP4 file with multiple chapters in a single folder
  

NOTE: A single CUE file for a single MKV or MP4 file with multiple chapters in a single folder uses the Chapter Names embedded in the MKV or MP4 file. Ideally the chapters names would be the song titles. MMH has a ‘Chapter Editor’ tool that supports renaming chapters from a Musicbrainz lookup or by a Copy and Paste from a track list. Of course, you can also manually edit the CUE file MMH creates and change the Track names in each cue file prior to scanning into Kodi or playback in another player (e.g JRiver).

CUE Files for Concerts in Kodi:
CUE files allow your Concert folder video files to be added to Kodi’s music library (not Kodi’s Music Video library). All the files in a concert folder can be viewed in the Kodi user interface as songs, concerts appear as ‘albums’. If your music video is a single MKV or MP4 file with chapters, you see all its chapters as ‘songs’ and you can play any song in the original multi chapter file by selecting the song in Kodi's music UI.

If you add your Concert folder as a Music Source in Kodi’s Media Settings, when Kodi reads each CUE during a music scan it creates an ‘album’ for each CUE and ‘songs’ for the concert’s artist by reading tags from the cue file. Users do not need to create NFO files (a requirement for Kodi’s Music Video library). A single CUE file in each folder contains enough information for the Kodi music scan to create data in the music database. Furthermore, the Kodi scan can use one of its music scrapers to find additional data online during the scan process, assuming your Artist and Album (concert name) match one of the online databases.

When you select Cue Creation in the Batch Creation tool, you get an option to ‘Check for Missing Chapter (song) names’. This option performs a recursive search from the selected Source Directory but does not save any CUE files. It checks for issues that should be fixed where artist and album (and chapters names cannot be found if a single file with multiple chapters) by MMH, allowing users to fix the issues prior to a full CUE creation run.

Click: ‘Check for Missing…’ option

Click: ‘Start Processing’ to run a Check

All the folders under the Source Directory are loaded into the Information list and if there is an issue the Error flag is shown against the folder as shown in the next screenshot:



Check Issues Reported (above):
Two issues can be reported:

Not All Chapters are named after songs: Occurs when a single file with multiple chapters has chapter names that do not contain Song Titles that would be used in the CUE file if it were created.

Fix: Rename the Chapters using MMH’s ‘Chapter Editor’ or ignore the error and edit the CUE file that will get created.

If you double-click on this error type in the Information List (above), MMH opens its ‘Chapter Editor’ tool for the file. (see OP)

NOTE: If you ignore this error MMH will create a CUE without valid Song Titles. (Not good for your Kodi experience!).

Minimum Data not found: Occurs when MMH could not find both the Artist and Album (concert) names to use as those tags in the CUE file if it were created (the CUE would not be imported into Kodi).

Fix: This error can be fixed by renaming the concert folder to the expected format or creating a Kodi music video compatible NFO file (MMH’s ‘Scrape a Concert Folder’ tool will create NFO files). If you have your files in Kodi's music video library you have NFO files already.

NOTE: MMH performs the following to attempt to get the Artist and Album names:
• Reads the concert folder name, expected naming format: ARTIST - ALBUM (YEAR)
• Looks for an NFO file (compatible with Kod’s Music Video library)

If you double-click on this error type in the Information List (above), MMH opens its Windows Explorer at the folder.

When the errors are resolved:

disable the ‘Check..’ option

Click: Start Processing

All the CUE files will be created (one per concert folder)

You are now ready to scan into the Kodi Music library.

MMH 4.2.1 also has a tool to join previously split concerts back into a new single multi chaptered MKV file, naming the Chapter's after the individual file names and auto-creating a CUE file.

MMH 4.2.1 PDF docs with updates here:
https://reva.blob.core.windows.net/mmh4/...tation.pdf

I'd like to do a full 'How To' write up on to setting up Kodi and how to do all this for existing users and post in a new thread here on the Kodi forum. 

THX
Garry

[Sylfest]

Hi Guys!
So my goal is (read dream) to put this release in the musiclibrary
https://musicbrainz.org/release/b22a5e98...0fdff743a6
It is somewhat possible with @HomerJau :s app "Music Media Helper" that can create .CUE files for .MKV files.
Making it look something like this without MusicBrainz ID:s in the Estuary skin:

All videos is stacking in "Disc 0"
I was thinking if there could be a possibility that Kodi could read <discnumber> and <discsubtitle> tags from the album.nfo or maybe those tags could be read from cuesheets. So the boxset could look more like this:
(This is just Mp3:s with MusicBrainz ID:s)


What do think? I have no idea how hard that would be or even if it is possible at all.
Thanks

[MikeKL]

Hi Slyfest

I feel you can "more or less" achieve what you want to do now with MMH if your DVD files are seperated into individual tracks and saved as mp4 with tagging.
(As your fully aware "thanks for the advice " Kodi supports .mp4 within music library, when an advancedsettings.xml advises music library of mp4 to be read)

The following is an example screengrab from MMH of following DVD I used as test case example https://www.discogs.com/Jamiroquai-High-...se/3019752
Note: How tracks of dvd are sub-chaptered (in above discogs link) to represent album they orginate from.  Note how I have grouped tracks per album (using album tag) and included (Temporarily for now) overall DVD Title they all physically come from in tagging comments field.



In the overall DVD folder being read by Kodi, I hold all files of the dvd as follows (I currently have not, but you could hold all seperated files of each dvd in one single folder using 1.xx, 2.xx, 3.xx naming structure for files from each dvd in your boxset)


This is what I see in my library in kodi (Where album art for each album, is grabbed form net and provided due to tagging)



If I use Kodi Music Folder view, I could then see/play all tracks from all above subgrouped items from (what would be in your case box DVD set) in one overall list. (note the folder.jpg is being used in folder view)





Is this approach perfect no, but it does make full use of existing Kodi capabilites/limitations, and could fulfill your desire.

[Sylfest]

Hi Slyfest

I feel you can "more or less" achieve what you want to do now with MMH if your DVD files are seperated into individual tracks and saved as mp4 with tagging.
(As your fully aware "thanks for the advice " Kodi supports .mp4 within music library, when an advancedsettings.xml advises music library of mp4 to be read)

Yes, thanks for your MP4 advice
I was going for .MKVs in this case since this is concerts and should be played gapeless with no glitch between songs. When there is just random musicvideos that does not matter to me at all.
Yes, I will probobly separete the discs with <album> tags (split the boxset)
Also I found that .MP4 is very limited to which video and audiostreams it can hold. A clean .MKV to .MP4 conversion without encoding often fails because of this.

[MikeKL]

Also I found that .MP4 is very limited to which video and audiostreams it can hold. A clean .MKV to .MP4 conversion without encoding often fails because of this.

Agreed, don’t particularly want to convert to mp4 because of limited Audio stream/format support, where it’s my basic understanding too that .mp4 wrapper is far more limiting than .mkv in what can be contained within the wrapper/container.

Keeping fingers crossed that Kodi will adopt .mkv like it already has for .mp4 for Music Library moving forward, where it would be good idea to collectively improve our understanding on what tagging .mkv wrapper can support; aligning currently available tags id's with existing music tagging that’s currently supported for other file types. (Since Kodi v16)

https://kodi.wiki/view/Music_tagging#Tags_Kodi_reads (Needs a full mkv column proposal introducing in kodi v19/v20) with ref to https://www.matroska.org/technical/tagging.html
I believe this is what @DaveBlake was proposing we thought about and pushed for consensus view from Kodi user community etc.

[HomerJau]

So my goal is (read dream) to put this release in the musiclibrary
https://musicbrainz.org/release/b22a5e98...0fdff743a6
It is somewhat possible with @HomerJau app "Music Media Helper" that can create .CUE files for .MKV files.
Making it look something like this without MusicBrainz ID in the Estuary skin:
[url=javascript:void(0)][/url]
All videos is stacking in "Disc 0"
I was thinking if there could be a possibility that Kodi could read <discnumber> and <discsubtitle> tags from the album.nfo or maybe those tags could be read from cuesheets. So the boxset could look more like this:
(This is just Mp3 with MusicBrainz ID)

I’m sure users can achieve this now @Sylfest 

With a CUE file and separate folder for each disc and a customised menu node in the Music library you’ll get what you want for concert in the Kodi Music library.

I’ll try this now and post some screen shots.

[HomerJau]

It appears Kodi doesn’t export the disc number or disc description in its library Export (album.nfo) or import those tags either from my experiments. I was hoping that may work to split your concerts over 2 or 3 discs in the UI.

Best you can do is create a single folder per disc and a cue for each folder, then 3 ‘albums’ will appear in the artist’s album view, your would need to title them with a disc suffix which would muck up any scraping done my Kodi during a scan. Since the titles won’t match a release.

Maybe @DaveBlake or @black_eagle could advise any possible solution.

For me, I’d just whack all the files in a single folder and create a single CUE with all the concert files.

[Sylfest]

It appears Kodi doesn’t export the disc number or disc description in its library Export (album.nfo) or import those tags either from my experiments. I was hoping that may work to split your concerts over 2 or 3 discs in the UI.

Thanks for confirming, I had a read at kodi wiki for which tags Kodi reads from album.nfo and cuesheets so I didn't really try that hard. And indeed no discnumber or disc description ie discsubtitle.

[DaveBlake]

It appears Kodi doesn’t export the disc number or disc description in its library Export (album.nfo) or import those tags either from my experiments. I was hoping that may work to split your concerts over 2 or 3 discs in the UI.

Disc number and disc subtitle are properties of the songs not the album and read from music file metadata, so no they are not exported as album information to album.nfo files (or single file). Think about it - say an album has songs across 3 discs, what is the disc number of the album?

Lack of disc number and subtitle, along with a number of other pieces of music file metadata, support in cuesheets is because the ancient cuesheet standards didn't have that data. Sure someone could implement a load of bespoke cuesheet elements and handle them in Kodi, but do we really want to start that kind of customization when embedded data is much better at the job? Such metadata is well established and widely used.

If someone did want to extend cuesheet functionality in bespoke ways then I would not block them, but it is far from what I think of as a good idea.

[MikeKL]

General Awareness: Recent "mp3tag v3.07" Supports inclusion and editing of cover art in MKV files.  (Video, Audio, Tagging + Cover art all contained within MKV wrapper)

[HomerJau]

Disc number and disc subtitle are properties of the songs not the album

Of course. How silly of me Dave. (and I’d found the Disc Description field in the Songs table too!).

I don’t think we should pursue a custom CUE solution. Maybe a Custom NFO? Although that’s a lot of effort to gain just Disc support IMO. 

@Sylfest The only way you’re going to get ‘discs’ is to use split concerts as tagged MP4 files, but then you are back to the pause between songs. I’d go with CUE and concerts as an ‘album’

[HomerJau]

General Awareness: Recent "mp3tag v3.07" Supports inclusion and editing of cover art in MKV files.  (Video, Audio, Tagging + Cover art all contained within MKV wrapper)

Kodi needs a MKV tag reader that works across multiple platforms.

Reading MKV track tags in Kodi would resolve the Disc requirement issue and remove the need for CUEs for concert videos.

[HomerJau]

@DaveBlake One of the MMH beta users (@MikeKL ) found two minor issues CUE playback for videos in the Music library:

1. Kodi always plays the next and subsequent tracks regardless of the Music setting (play next song)
2. The last track does not display Duration in the Kodi UI. (I haven’t tested for CUEs for audio files)

Although these are not critical, it would be nice to get a fix at some stage if possible.

If you need test files please let me know.

THX

[Sylfest]

Disc number and disc subtitle are properties of the songs not the album and read from music file metadata, so no they are not exported as album information to album.nfo files (or single file). Think about it - say an album has songs across 3 discs, what is the disc number of the album?

Yes, that makes perfect sense.

@Sylfest The only way you’re going to get ‘discs’ is to use split concerts as tagged MP4 files, but then you are back to the pause between songs. I’d go with CUE and concerts as an ‘album’

Thanks, yes sorry for wasting your time on this.

[HomerJau]

Thanks, yes sorry for wasting your time on this.

No problem at all. I would use the ‘disc’ feature for music videos on some release it was available, so worth taking a look.