[dgas]

I have issues with many MusicBrainz artist IDs showing up in artist lists.  From looking around the forums, I gather that the scanner attempts to match up the MusicBrainz artist IDs to the album artist tags, and if it fails to do so, uses the MBIDs as artist names.  Here is my problem.  While I retain all MBIDs written by Picard, I will edit my artist and album artist tags to suit my own needs and preferences.  I believe that's where things are running afoul.  I'd like to disable this artist "fall back" behavior.  I have all the library settings set to local metadata only, and I don't intend to use any online metadata.  So, I don't need the artist MBIDs for that purpose.

Alternatively, I'd like to know if there's a way to tell the scanner to ignore all the MBID tags.  I'd prefer keep the release MBIDs for the sake of release merging and splitting, but the artist IDs are such a problem, that I'd give this a try.

[DaveBlake]

You are seeing MusicBrainz artist IDs showing up in artist lists because you have manually edited the ARTIST, ARTISTS, ALBUMARTIST and ALBUMARTISTS tag values but not edited the corresponding MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID and MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID to match. My advise is either to not add Musicbrainz ID tags at all, or if you feel you have to edit artist values then also take care to edit the mbid values to match.

BTW scraping metadata and artwork online is not the only reason to used mbids, it also provides a way to handle multiple releases of an album (say a basic and deluxe edition) or different individual artists with the same name (name is not unique). Have have a mix of music files tagged with and without mbids in my music library (mostly because of my tagging history), Musicbrainz is not mandatory but can be useful.

Kodi is designed to use Musicbrainz ID values when they are present and assumes that if a file has some Musicbrainz ID values then it has a complete set and that they match the other tag values consistently.  There is no option to ignore them.

I will edit my artist and album artist tags to suit my own needs and preferences.

My guess is that mostly you are removing artists, but not removing the matching artist mbid value. Kodi still knows about that artists from the mbid but not the name. If you start to use different artists and don't change the mbid values too then things will get very knotted indeed. Do you really need to edit what Picard does? If you do then edit the mbid values too.

[dgas]

You are seeing MusicBrainz artist IDs showing up in artist lists because you have manually edited the ARTIST, ARTISTS, ALBUMARTIST and ALBUMARTISTS tag values but not edited the corresponding MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID and MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID to match. My advise is either to not add Musicbrainz ID tags at all, or if you feel you have to edit artist values then also take care to edit the mbid values to match.

Yes, this is what I figured out on my own.  I'm not going to remove the MBIDs, because they are still useful to me.  It's not that I'm changing the artists to different artists, I'm just removing aritsts that I don't find useful in the artist tags.  I still want the artist MBIDs in my tags, just not in Kodi.
 

BTW scraping metadata and artwork online is not the only reason to used mbids, it also provides a way to handle multiple releases of an album (say a basic and deluxe edition) or different individual artists with the same name (name is not unique). Have have a mix of music files tagged with and without mbids in my music library (mostly because of my tagging history), Musicbrainz is not mandatory but can be useful.

Yes, as I said, I still would like the release MBIDs for release merging/splitting.  I don't have a need for same with the artist MBIDs.
 

Kodi is designed to use Musicbrainz ID values when they are present and assumes that if a file has some Musicbrainz ID values then it has a complete set and that they match the other tag values consistently. There is no option to ignore them.

In my opinion, that's not a same assumption to make, but I understand the default behavior, and I won't call it a bug.  I think there's an opportunity for improvement, however.  Anyway, barring that, I was asking if there is some general way to ignore selected tags.  Where I could list certain tags for the scanner to ignore, be they MBIDs or anything else I could care to exclude form the Kodi DB.

[DaveBlake]

Kodi is designed to use Musicbrainz ID values when they are present and assumes that if a file has some Musicbrainz ID values then it has a complete set and that they match the other tag values consistently. There is no option to ignore them.

In my opinion, that's not a same assumption to make, but I understand the default behavior, and I won't call it a bug.  I think there's an opportunity for improvement, however.  Anyway, barring that, I was asking if there is some general way to ignore selected tags.  Where I could list certain tags for the scanner to ignore, be they MBIDs or anything else I could care to exclude form the Kodi DB.

There are plenty of possible areas of Kodi to improve and lots of innovations to make, and frankly I don't think anyone cares whether YOU call it a bug or not that Kodi is reading and applying the tag values from your music files.

Anyway as I said - no there is no way to tell Kodi to ignore certain tags.

Since you are manually editing your tagging the power is completely in your own hands to resolve your own problem. When you edit the
ARTIST, ARTISTS, ALBUMARTIST and ALBUMARTISTS tag values and remove an artist also edit the corresponding MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID and MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID values to remove the matching mbid value. I am not saying remove the Musicbrainz tags, but edit your tag values in a consistent way.

[dgas]

There are plenty of possible areas of Kodi to improve and lots of innovations to make, and frankly I don't think anyone cares whether YOU call it a bug or not that Kodi is reading and applying the tag values from your music files.

Clearly, I left the wrong impression with those comments.  I was trying to say that I agree with how it currently works by default, and offering ideas that could add some flexibility.
 

Anyway as I said - no there is no way to tell Kodi to ignore certain tags.

Apologies, I interpreted your earlier response as saying there was no way to ignore MBID tags, specifically (as in, not some global "Ignore MusicBrainz ID tags" option).

Since you are manually editing your tagging the power is completely in your own hands to resolve your own problem. When you edit the
ARTIST, ARTISTS, ALBUMARTIST and ALBUMARTISTS tag values and remove an artist also edit the corresponding MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID and MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID values to remove the matching mbid value. I am not saying remove the Musicbrainz tags, but edit your tag values in a consistent way.

Yes, I understand. As I tried to explain, the MBID tags for the artists that I remove from ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS are still useful to me. Clearly, there is no nothing to be done at this time. Thanks, anyway.

[DaveBlake]

@dgas over 6 years I have probably seen 1 or 2 users ask about making which tags are scanned optional in some way, each had some specific reason with their music files, but I don't think it is a good idea generally. The problem comes with library updates and rescanning - what set of parameters were used to scan which files? Do users want these files scanned with X read but those other files with it ignored? We could solve that by storing tag option "sets" and which were used for the song etc. , but it just gets more and more complex for something that 99.9% of users do not need. There would also be those users that turned off a tag, and then later wonder why they can't see or use certain library features.

Hence the simple approach: if Kodi can read tag data from a music file then it will try to use it, tag your music files consistenly and fully (and there are plenty of great free tools to help users do that in ways that suit them and their needs).

As I tried to explain, the MBID tags for the artists that I remove from ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS are still useful to me.

Can you explain more, I'm always curious about user needs and how they use Kodi (even if I'm not going to implement anything). How can keeping an extraneous mbid tag frame value be useful in any way?

Let's make an example, say using Picard to tag a collaboration album has resulted in the following tag values.

ARTIST = "artistA and artistB feat. artistX"
ARTISTS = "artistA", "artistB", "artistX"
ALBUMARTIST = "artistA and artistB"
ALBUMARTISTS = "artistA", "artistB"
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID = "mbidA", "mbidB", "mbidX"
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID = "mbidA", "mbidB"

You then edit ARTIST, ARTISTS, ALBUMARTIST and ALBUMARTISTS removing "artistB", but eave value "mbidB" in MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID and MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID? Kodi sees the 3 mbid values, but only has 2 artist names so knows that something is inconsistent about your tagging and so adds an artist with mbid as name to make it obvious there is an inconsistency that needs to be fixed.

I am suggesting that if you have edited such that
ARTIST = "artistA feat. artistX"
ARTISTS = "artistA", "artistX"
ALBUMARTIST = "artistA"
ALBUMARTISTS = "artistA"

Then you also edit
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID = "mbidA", "mbidX"
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID = "mbidA"

Perhaps you can give an example of why you want to remving the name but leave the mbid.

[dgas]

The problem comes with library updates and rescanning - what set of parameters were used to scan which files? Do users want these files scanned with X read but those other files with it ignored? We could solve that by storing tag option "sets" and which were used for the song etc. , but it just gets more and more complex for something that 99.9% of users do not need. There would also be those users that turned off a tag, and then later wonder why they can't see or use certain library features.

I wouldn't advocate for anything like that, either.  I think you're talking about a per-source option.  The only thing I had in mind was a global option (likely with an edit to advancedsettings.xml) that would apply going forward, and one would usually be expected to scan from scratch after such a change.  Nothing about that addresses your last concern, of course.
 

Can you explain more, I'm always curious about user needs and how they use Kodi (even if I'm not going to implement anything). How can keeping an extraneous mbid
tag frame value be useful in any way?

Most importantly, my custom tagging tools use them for MB API lookups.  I may not use these artists for ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS, but I may want them for PERFORMER, COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR, ARRANGER, etc.  Having the IDs present means means name and sort name can be grabbed from the API and used for other purposes.  I also use them for things like the Run services component in foobar2000.

[dgas]

Hi, I revisiting this to better understand the issues with my tags.  How does the scanner match the ID tags to the name tags?  Is it by position?  They are expected to be in the same order?

[scott967]

Hi, I revisiting this to better understand the issues with my tags.  How does the scanner match the ID tags to the name tags?  Is it by position?  They are expected to be in the same order?

Yes.   And it's been while but I think if there is a mis-match in number of entries then the ids get dropped, but would need to double check that.  I know personally I am careful to double-check that I have the right number of ids for multi artists.

scott s.
.

[dgas]

Yes.   And it's been while but I think if there is a mis-match in number of entries then the ids get dropped, but would need to double check that.  I know personally I am careful to double-check that I have the right number of ids for multi artists.

I see IDs when I browse by Artist, so I don't think it's dropping IDs in my case.  Let me provide some examples that I've been testing with.  I've been looking at album artist tags in particular.

Example one.  This release has two artists in the release artist credit.  For compatibility and other reasons, I only ever have one ALBUMARTIST tag (in the Vorbis Comment schema); for multiples, I use ALBUMARTISTS.  So, for this release, my tags would normally be:

ALBUMARTIST: Edvard Grieg
ALBUMARTISTS: Edvard Grieg / Einar Steen-Nøkleberg
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID: [x2]

When I browse by Artist with only this release loaded, both Grieg and Steen-Nøkleberg show up normally, and there no IDs.  It could be that Kodi is successfully matching ALBUMARTISTS to MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID, but I'm unsure.  At the very least, it seems to be reading ALBUMARTISTS.

Example two.  This release have five artists in the release AC.  However, I only have the first five tracks, which I think I picked up on ClassicalArchives for free ages ago.  It wouldn't make sense to have Paganini or Bizet in my tags.  For for this release, I would have:

ALBUMARTIST: Edvard Grieg
ALBUMARTISTS: Edvard Grieg / Eduard Grach / Moscow Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID: [x5]

When I browse by Artist with only this release loaded, Grieg shows up normally, and then there are four IDs for the other release artists (at least, I assume they are from the release artists).  If Kodi was reading ALBUMARTISTS, I would have expected only two IDs.  However, it's important to note that these files are MP3/ID3 (the first example was Vorbis).  That's TXXX:ALBUMARTISTS in ID3, similar to TXXX:ARTISTS for multiple track artists.  I'm not sure how widespread this practice is outside of a few in the MusicBrainz community.  In any case, it's hard to tell if I'm reaching the right conclusions.

Can anyone provide pointers on exactly which ID3 frames Kodi uses for the MusicBrainz release artist ID matching?

[black_eagle]

TXXX:ALBUMARTISTS in ID3

That is the correct frame. However, the number of albumartists needs to match the number of musicbrainz_albumartistid's. One is 3 the other is 5. If you want Kodi to figure it out, remove the two redundant musicbrainz_albumartistid's that don't match any albumartist. Otherwise, as you see, Kodi will attempt to show you there is an issue with your tagging (number of albumartists != number of mbids).

Relevant part of the album artists matching code is probably https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master...#L155-L163 where it clearly states "If we have more names than musicbrainz id they are ignored, but raise a warning".