[robk]

I have tried to use the search function for fimding composers in my local library. Apparently this function does not look into the 'composer' tag. Is this indeed the case? If so, it would be a nice improvement if the search function also scans the composer tag. Or is there another way to find composers?

[black_eagle]

I have tried to use the search function for fimding composers in my local library. Apparently this function does not look into the 'composer' tag. Is this indeed the case?

If you're talking about the global search facility then sadly, yes it is indeed the case that currently, it does not consider composer tags at all.  However, it's a script so could be updated to do so I guess. 
 

is there another way to find composers?

You can navigate via Music -> roles -> composers, which will list all of the composers that you have.  Selecting a composer will then show what they have composed.

[scott967]

I did hack global search to do that and and seems to be OK, but I don't see an easy way to list what the artist role is; just provide the songs as search results.  I added a setting to enable it.  It gets all contributors, not just composers by adding the allroles bool to the JSON-RPC calls.  You can check out my fork in allroles branch on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/scott967/script.globa...e/allroles

scott s.
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[robk]

Scott967: This does the job. Many thanks!

[scott967]

I will be back home later this week.  Will do some more looking at it and submit a PR so maybe it can be added to the official version.

scott s.
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[Bach565]

I just started using Kodi to organize my music collection and noticed the same glaring deficiency.  I can't search by composer, and in the playlist views I've found so far, the composer of a piece is not listed.  This is rather less than helpful when you have a lot of classical music!  The Symphony No. 1 by Beethoven is rather different than the one by Tchaikovsky.

How can I find the script that needs to be updated so I can search by composer?  And how can I modify the skin or whatever is needed so that I can see the composer listed along with track title, artist, etc.?

[scott967]

I don't think you can directly search for composers, but you can open the composer library node and filter that.  Otherwise, I have a mod of the script.globalsearch addon that adds a settings toggle to search "all roles" rather than just performing artists.  You can get it here and install from zip:
https://gitlab.com/scott967/script.globa...ases/6.0.9

scott s.
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[Bach565]

Thanks - that works, although it lists the composers as artists instead of composers. Does Kodi not know what a composer is?  It doesn't display composer information when playing a track or displaying a playlist either.  Is there a skin that provides that missing piece?  It's really confusing to try to figure out which piece is what.

[black_eagle]

Does Kodi not know what a composer is?

Yes, it does.  But as usual with music stuff, it heavily depends upon your tagging. See the section "Tags Kodi reads"  on this page.



That's just a screenshot of the song information dialog in the stock skin, Estuary.

You can also look under Music / Roles and find composers, Lyricists, Arrangers etc all listed there. Opening composers will list all the composers that are in your tags and opening a composer in that list will give you a list of albums that they are a composer on, and opening an album will give you the tracks that they composed. This is assuming your tags are correct of course.

[scott967]

Some skins might be better than others re composer display.  Typical problem is users generally want classical displayed differently from other styles.  (For my part I use my own role of "songwriter" for pop, not "composer" for example).

I think I was wrong about not being able to search on composer.  I will try to do a proof of concept mod of global search addon.

scott s.
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[scott967]

OK here is what I put together for global search.  You control it in the addons "settings".  It could be better done, but for now is just a new radiobutton for "composers".  The search parameters are logical "or", so you need to disable the "artists" and "artists all roles" setting to restrict your search to composers .

test ver 9.1.1

download zip and install addon from zip.  Ignore the source code, as current official release maintainer is "ronie" and he uses gitlab rather than github, so the actual source code is there, not at the github link.

scott s.
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[Bach565]

Does Kodi not know what a composer is?

Yes, it does.  But as usual with music stuff, it heavily depends upon your tagging. See the section "Tags Kodi reads"  on this page.

I think I'm learning a few things here. First, my SACD recordings don't appear to have correct tags in a lot of cases, so that's messing me up. But even for recordings where I know the tags are right, I'm not seeing them when browsing through an album, as here:

In this case, I know who wrote the piece, since it's all Mussourgsky.  But it's very confusing in cases like this:


There are so many "Trumpet Tunes" that I have no idea who wrote this one.  I'd like to see that listed on the left, but I don't know how to change that.

If I look at the information page for an individual track, then I do see the composer listed:

You can also look under Music / Roles and find composers, Lyricists, Arrangers etc all listed there. Opening composers will list all the composers that are in your tags and opening a composer in that list will give you a list of albums that they are a composer on, and opening an album will give you the tracks that they composed. This is assuming your tags are correct of course.

Ah! I didn't know that composers could be found under "Roles." That's very helpful. Now I'm going to have to figure out why some composers are showing up multiple times in the list. I suspect some characters look the same but are actually different UTF-8 code points, or something like that.

Thanks very much for your help.  I'm at least making some progress here!