[Bobby Blixberg]

IIRC there have been plans to add record label support for music in KODI, which is as essential as studio tags for movies and films…
But I cannot find it in 19.1 - am I missing something?

[DaveBlake]

Support for record label was added in v17. Scanning music files into the library reads the label tag from embedded metadata, for the specific tag name in various tag formats see https://kodi.wiki/view/Music_tagging#Tags_Kodi_reads. Basically if you tag your music files using Picard then record label data will be included.

Rather than repeat common data for every track, Kodi stores record label as album data, taking the value from the first music file. Record label can then be used in smart playlist, custom node and dynamic (from sideblade "filter") filtering for albums. Skins can also display it, but I'm not sure which do that is up to the skinner, and it is acccessible via JSON API so remote apps and web interface could use it, again up to the authors. If not provided in music file metadata then it can be set via album NFO file (music file  data takes precidence).

No idea why you are missing this. Did you expect a default "label" node, or were you looking for it as a song property?

[Bobby Blixberg]

Thanks for your detailed reply.
I tag my files with foobar2000 and Mp3tag.
Regardless of the skin used I don't see a label entry under Categories, just "Genres", "Artists", "Albums" and so on - I would expect a "Label" category here.

[DaveBlake]

Ah, you were expecting a "Labels" default node. No there isn't one of those just like there isn't a moods, styles, themes or release type node, or for songs a BPM one.

I have a long running WIP that offers different kind of music browsing/navigation with user defined filtering and grouping of everything, but it is a huge job and I wonder if I will ever get there. Attempts to just bolt in generic grouping by other fields would clash with filtering and way queries are built making some slow SQL, and so not a trivial addition and would make other improvements harder.

[Bobby Blixberg]

So there‘s still no label support in music as far as I understand…
I thought it would be easy to implement it, from my understanding the „Artists“ node reads from the artist tag in music files, so it should not be a problem to add a node which reads from the label tag … I‘m more confused than before now.

Or in other words: What’s the benefit of the implementation of labels in version 14?

[black_eagle]

so it should not be a problem to add a node which reads from the label tag

You can do that yourself with the library node editor addon.

Create a parent node "Record Labels" or something and inside that create a node for each label you want.  Then you can navigate for instance Record Labels -> Vertigo -> list of albums.  Depending on how accurate your tagging is and how strict you want the filtering to be, you can use a rule of "containing" or "startswith" so that you can group f.e "EMI" and "EMI UK" under the same node.  It's quite flexible but you will have to set it up yourself, Kodi doesn't do it automatically.

You can also filter your full album list by one or more labels by using the filter in the left sideblade.

[jjd-uk]

At moment it's really only of use in the Filter function on the side menu





The others uses require you to know what labels already exist and add them one at a time, other than that filter function there's nothing else that will return all labels that exist as far as I'm aware.

[jjd-uk]

Create a parent node "Record Labels" or something and inside that create a node for each label you want.  Then you can navigate for instance Record Labels -> Vertigo -> list of albums.  Depending on how accurate your tagging is and how strict you want the filtering to be, you can use a rule of "containing" or "startswith" so that you can group f.e "EMI" and "EMI UK" under the same node.  It's quite flexible but you will have to set it up yourself, Kodi doesn't do it automatically.

Which quite frankly is a pain in the arse compared with say Genre which will simple return all Genres in library automatically without having to specifiy every single genre.

Personally I'd like to see far more things added to the ability to Group to allow far more type of nodes to be created, but I understand Dave being relunctant as it would make doing what he wants far more difficult from what I understand.

[Bobby Blixberg]

Create a parent node "Record Labels" or something and inside that create a node for each label you want.  Then you can navigate for instance Record Labels -> Vertigo -> list of albums.  Depending on how accurate your tagging is and how strict you want the filtering to be, you can use a rule of "containing" or "startswith" so that you can group f.e "EMI" and "EMI UK" under the same node.  It's quite flexible but you will have to set it up yourself, Kodi doesn't do it automatically.

Nice idea, but there are more than 6.000 labels in my library...

[DaveBlake]

Personally I'd like to see far more things added to the ability to Group to allow far more type of nodes to be created, but I understand Dave being relunctant as it would make doing what he wants far more difficult from what I understand.

You make it sound like I am reluctant to have such a feature, and I'm not.

It is so easy to list what we would like to see Kodi do, less so to achieve it.

My point is that what looks like something trvial (silly designer just forgot to add options to the editor etc.), will produce some horrible SQL if added without some careful refactoring. This already happens in the case of genre, if you combine the possible filtering and grouping features it can lock into queries that take minutes without away to interrupt. Thankfully few users trip over it, but I know it is there and
a) I don't want to add to that kind of problem
b) I don't want to be distracted onto a workraround when I would rather put my effort into an even better feature.
c) I don't want to be distracted onto checking someone elses efforts and explaining what is wrong with it, how to do it etc.

If c) makes me a bad guy then so be it, but it is just some honesty. There are plenty of other bugs to fix and areas of Kodi functionality that no dev as any interest in whatsoever, go climb that mountain. If someone has a real passion for the music library then great, but they will have to really prove themselves, and I would far rather do this work myself than mentor someone that expected appreciation etc. So I slap a big warning sign on it!

[scott967]

Something else, in my MP3Tag I use APE and FLAC tags, and the musicbrainz query function returns "PUBLISHER" which I have an action set up to copy it into LABEL.

scott s.
.

[Daydream]

Something else, in my MP3Tag I use APE and FLAC tags, and the musicbrainz query function returns "PUBLISHER" which I have an action set up to copy it into LABEL.

scott s.
.

You knew that some pedantic tagger will come and explain that that's wrong, right?

While Label and Publisher may be the same, that is not a given. Even the assumption of picking up the info from the first track is flawed. Perfect example that covers both exceptions: Celine Dion - "The Colour of My Love" album.

The Label for the album is Columbia, but the Publisher is Sony Music CMG. Sure, we can debate that Sony owns Columbia, but strictly speaking about grouping and filtering, those are distinct terms.

More. The first track of the album is 'The Power Of Love', which is a Jennifer Rush cover. Rush is published by CBS and EMI, while Celine by Sony, so in this case the publishing rights of the first song are with CBS and EMI. By the time we get to the 8th song on the album (a duet covering a song, and splitting the publishing rights and stuff) that one has some 8 publishers or more. Things will get very complicated in a hurry. Picking up the first song for all info is, I guess... where the smart man grew tired and drew a line.

But Labels are not always Publishers.

[scott967]

Something else, in my MP3Tag I use APE and FLAC tags, and the musicbrainz query function returns "PUBLISHER" which I have an action set up to copy it into LABEL.

scott s.
.

You knew that some pedantic tagger will come and explain that that's wrong, right?

While Label and Publisher may be the same, that is not a given. Even the assumption of picking up the info from the first track is flawed. Perfect example that covers both exceptions: Celine Dion - "The Colour of My Love" album.

The Label for the album is Columbia, but the Publisher is Sony Music CMG. Sure, we can debate that Sony owns Columbia, but strictly speaking about grouping and filtering, those are distinct terms.

More. The first track of the album is 'The Power Of Love', which is a Jennifer Rush cover. Rush is published by CBS and EMI, while Celine by Sony, so in this case the publishing rights of the first song are with CBS and EMI. By the time we get to the 8th song on the album (a duet covering a song, and splitting the publishing rights and stuff) that one has some 8 publishers or more. Things will get very complicated in a hurry. Picking up the first song for all info is, I guess... where the smart man grew tired and drew a line.

But Labels are not always Publishers.

Understood, just explaining as OP indicated using mp3tag, and the musicbrainz search function does ask for "label" from the musicbrainz database, but then stores it as %publisher% internally which then is default saved as TPUB or PUBLISHER depending on tag format.  That works for ID3v2 tags, as Kodi treats TPUB as label, but not for other formats, where Kodi looks for LABEL.  So for MP3Tag, you need to be aware of this.

scott s.
.