[mister_eff]

Hello, is there a best practice for how to tag albums that have been released a bunch of times with different editions so you can keep track of the editions but still scrobble them and have last.fm find the right album art?

For example, The Beatles' Abbey Road, you might have the 2009 remaster, the 2019 stereo remix, or even the 2019 5.1 remix. I normally put the edition of the album in the album tag, so the album tag might read "Abbey Road [2019 Stereo Mix]" or even "Abbey Road [2019 5.1 Mix]", but having that extra information in the album tag mixes up last.fm and it doesn't find the right album art. For example, here's a last.fm link showing how other people tag their 2019 mix, many of which don't have any album art associated with them.

I'm just wondering how people handle this and if they see this as an issue. In foobar2000 and Poweramp on my phone, I have a script that basically omits anything in brackets so any edition information is ignored, which generally works. But I don't think I can do that in Kodi. Because of that, I'm wondering if I should just re-do all my tags so the album only contains the album information, and any edition information is stored elsewhere. Is there a best practice already associated with this that I'm unaware of? I've seen discussion of disambiguation tags, but I don't know how they work. Are they just custom tags people write themselves? Some discussions I've seen are:

https://community.metabrainz.org/t/disam...e/417629/9

https://community.metabrainz.org/t/album...e/476341/3

Do people just have their own version of %releaseedition% or something?

I'm just curious if this is something people have considered/cared about. Or... if there's actually an easy way to have the last.fm script ignore the contents of brackets the way I have foobar2000 and Poweramp set-up.

thanks

Edit: For future reference... So, I just edited Kodi's scrobbling script to remove anything between the brackets so now everything scrobbles mostly correctly.

My investigating of multiple album editions also helped me solve another issue I was having with Kodi, namely that it was mixing up artist and album art (which I have saved locally). When there is a MusicBrainz Album/Release ID, Kodi catalogs albums that way. If there are multiple albums with the same release ID, Kodi will mix up the album titles as well as the album/artist art.

[black_eagle]

Can't say for last.fm stuff, but if you tag with musicbrainz picard, both albums will have different mbid's and display correctly in Kodi, even if the strings in the album tag are identical.  Kodi should also be able to find the correct album art.  That's just one of the benefits of tagging with mbids, which is what I would recommend.

See here for more information. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to come back and ask them.

Tagging with mbids allows things like this


where 3 albums all have the same name.

Due to the richness of the tags, Kodi can also display things like this



Composers, lyricists, conductors etc etc are all listable and searchable. For instance, opening the roles node and then clicking on composer will give you a list of composers. Clicking on a name will list the albums they have composed tracks for, and clicking on an album in that list will show you the tracks that they have composed.

MBID tags will also let Kodi handle disambiguation correctly. See the image below where both John Williams the classical guitarist and John Williams the score composer are both shown.

[mister_eff]

Hello black_eagle,

Thanks for the reply. I've scanned my whole library with MusicBrainz so I have all the unique MBIDs, but I still browse by folder, so that stuff is still a bit new to me. It's very cool, I'll have to try it.

I actually went into the python code for the Kodi last.fm scrobbler and manually had the code ignore everything between the brackets for my album tag, so now last.fm searches for the core album tag and correctly finds the album art. So now all my non-classical music looks like it's getting scrobbled the way I want, regardless of how I play it.

[black_eagle]

I have all the unique MBIDs, but I still browse by folder

That's a shame.  Although Kodi will load the tags when browsing that way, the actual library views offer so much more.   Most skins are also designed to show more information in those views too. For instance, the album description is shown on the left here.



Or you can drop the art and just see the titles (a bit more like the files view)



Those are sorted by original release year, but you can also sort alphabetically, or by playcount or any one of

[scott967]

Judging by the "fun" in creating a feature to group movies into a single library folder containing "versions", would recommend holding off on such a feature for music for now.

scott s.
.

[black_eagle]

Judging by the "fun" in creating a feature to group movies into a single library folder containing "versions", would recommend holding off on such a feature for music for now.

Fully agree with the first bit, but wasn't aware I (or anyone else) was suggesting anything like that for the music library?

[mister_eff]

Hmm, I'll try browsing via the library again maybe, but I do too many blasphemous things with my library so historically I've always had issues using any kind of library.

I group certain artists together, like "Paul McCartney", "Paul and Linda McCartney", "Paul McCartney and Wings" and "Wings" all just go into the "Paul McCartney" folder. I have a custom tag that matches the folder name, but to get music players to use it, I have to get into the code again and I haven't done that. Most music players just stick with %artist% or maybe also %album artist%, but %album artist% does mean something different I think.

For my classical music, I put the performer in the artist tag so it makes sorting by artist a massive pain. "Bernaird Haitink, London Symphony Orchestra" is different from "Colin Davis, London Symphony Orchestra" is different from "Colin Davis, London Symphony Orchestra, random choir, random soloist". For my folder structure, I group classical music by composer, so that makes it easier to browse by folder.

I also realized that Kodi really wants the MusicBrainz Release ID to be unique to each album/folder. I sometimes split up deluxe versions of albums, so the main album is in one folder and all the bonus/live tracks are in another folder, so the main album still has the original release year instead of the deluxe version release year. Then, I use the deluxe version release year for the bonus track discs. That way, if I have multiple versions of the album, they all show up next to each other.

I also split up my SACD rips into different folders. On MusicBrainz, one SACD has 3 discs: the CD layer, the SACD stereo layer, and the SACD multichannel layer. But each disc has the same release ID (understandably). I usually only keep the SACD stereo and multichannel layers, but I put those into different folders, so they show up next to each other. If they all got grouped under the same folder, I'd have to put (5.1 mix) in the track title the way MusicBrainz often (but not always) does, which causes trouble with scrobbling, searching for lyrics, etc.

So the folder structure for a rock release would look like:

1973-03 - The Dark Side Of The Moon [2003 5.1 SACD]
1973-03 - The Dark Side Of The Moon [2003 Stereo SACD]
1973-03 - The Dark side Of The Moon [2023 Remaster]
2023 - The Dark Side Of The Moon 50th Anniversary Bonus Discs

Or something like that. But then, multiple folders in parallel can have the same MusicBrainz Release ID, which I have recently found out is trouble for Kodi.

I've only recently started using Kodi a lot more for music playback, so I'm only now running into these things. I've spent a long time thinking about how I want to sort my music, but it's often just a little different than what MusicBrainz or whatever wants. So now I'm trying to learn what the "official" way to do things is, and whether I should change anything.

[black_eagle]

Hmmm, fisrt off, Kodi's music library has no concept of folders / directories.  They are only useful when browsing by files.  However, there are also 'sources' which you can also use to split up your collection(s). Sources can be used in smartplaylists or nodes to only display certain parts of your collection.  You could for example have sources defined as 'Baroque' and 'Chamber Music', 'Stuff my wife likes' etc etc

@DaveBlake put in several years work into making Kodi properly support classical music (or at least, as far as he could within the constraints Kodi has) so I think it's probably much better at doing this than you might realise.

I think it's probably worth taking a subset of your stuff, copying it to a new, fresh location, fixing up all the tags properly with all the correct mbid stuff and scanning them in to see what the end result is.  If you are on Windows, you can even do this with a portable install of Kodi so it won't affect anything you have already.  Looked at that way, what have you to lose except some time??

[mister_eff]

Thanks, There are some clean-up of the MBIDs I can do. I just finished adding SACD/etc rips and need to do a 2nd pass through my library to see if I made any errors (as well as fix the previously mentioned deluxe edition thing).

I might try what you've suggested and take a look at browsing via the library again. I've just had a bad experience with browsing with libraries for 20 years, basically since importing my library into iPods. I've literally been putting classical performers into the artist tag for 20 years.

I also sort classical music differently from non-classical, but I like to keep them all in the same directory so music isn't separated.

Non-classical: \Artist\Date - Album
Classical: \Composer\Album - Artist - Date

If you have other links on how Kodi wants a classical library (or music library containing a lot of classical) organized or how it's designed to be used, I'd be interested in reading them. I just haven't found a system that I like before.

[black_eagle]

If you have other links on how Kodi wants a classical library (or music library containing a lot of classical) organized or how it's designed to be used, I'd be interested in reading them. I just haven't found a system that I like before.

There is Dave's roadmap here. It's not up to date because some of the stuff that he hadn't got around to has been done, either by me, Dave or another contributor. It's worth a look though just to get an idea of how much work Dave put in.

What I can tell you, is that messing with the tags is never the right way to go about things. Once you start going down that rabbit hole, you have to keep going for everything you add. Better to figure out why Kodi isn't showing / sorting / doing x and then asking about it here. Either there will already be a way to achieve it, or it might spark interest in improving / adding a feature.

[mister_eff]

Thanks for the link. I don't see anything specifically for classical music, though.

Yeah, I leave the MusicBrainz tags generally untouched (aside from uniformly capitalizing things, removing "20xx remaster" from track titles, and making classical titles consistent, I guess there's a few things I change). That's why it's easier for me to just browse by folder. I can leave the tags mostly the way Kodi/MusicBrainz likes them but I can use the folder structure to sort things the way I like them. I just run into little problems because I'm unfamiliar with how the Kodi/MusicBrainz/last.fm people intend things.

I found these threads from @DaveBlake :

• https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=334729
  
• https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=355179
  

In the first, he says he recommends using multiple sources for splitting up the music library:

I reccommend using multiple music sources (they can all be separate folders on one drive) as a convenient way of splitting up any music collection.

I get why he makes this recommendation, as that would probably make dealing with a classical collection easier, but I've always disliked splitting up my music collection. Early on, I tried separating my classical music from my non-classical to ease sorting, but I found that that made it easy for me to just ignore my classical music collection. I just like having all my music on the same level. But I'll consider experimenting with Kodi on my PC and experimenting with a multiple sources on a sample of my collection, after I do more MusicBrainz library proofreading.

Also I realize this is now quite a bit off topic.

[scott967]

I personally bit the bullet and adopted the musicbrainz classical style guide.  The main weakness I have with this in Kodi is lack of support for "work"  and the "part of" relation.  I use the "involved people list" construct to deal with performers.  I also use that for non-classical "songwriter" so not mixed with "composer".

scott s.
.

[mister_eff]

I realized what the problem was with my original issue of Kodi not finding the right album artwork. It happens if there are multiple albums with different %album% tags with the same MusicBrainzAlbumID. So in my case, I was noticing it when I had multiple editions of the same album, usually if they were in the same release. For example, if a Super Deluxe set includes a stereo mix, mono mix, and blu-ray with 5.1 mix (or SACD/DVD-A with stereo and multichannel layers), I would have a different %album% tag for each mix, but they all have the same album/release ID according to MusicBrainz, so that would mix Kodi up. Kodi would also display the wrong album name during playback for the same reason.

(also the reason I like to do the tags that way is because otherwise, I'd have to put "(5.1 mix)" in the %title% tag or something, and that screws up scrobbling and looks messy IMO. I guess I could also use the %discsubtitle% tag, but not every music player will look at that)

This also happens for box sets that compile an artists discography, like The Clash's Sound System boxset. I'd change the %album% tags so each album would show up as its own entry but then keep the MusicBrainzAlbumID the same. The %discsubtitle% tags were also tagged with the album name. Kodi would get confused in a similar way.

I guess that's on me for modifying the MusicBrainz tagging system, but I just wanted to note it in case it happens to someone else.

[scott967]

Don't have personal experience, but IIRC the concept is to use the same album title for all disks and use the discsubtitle for each individual disk in the boxset.

scott s.
.

[mister_eff]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I believe that is the suggested practice for box sets, but I like seeing the individual albums so I separate them. Fixing that is easy enough since I can just tag the albums as if I bought them individually, and it's not an issue.

I haven't come up with an agreeable solution for my multichannel vs stereo thing, though. I still prefer to put different versions of each album as their own "releases" instead of putting the stereo and multichannel mix under the umbrella of a single SACD release, but that leaves me with the issue of having different albums with the same album/release ID. Additionally, some rarer SACDs don't even have the different layers applied correctly on MusicBrainz so I don't really have an option except to assign the album/release ID to both mixes.

Example of complete SACD Release with 3 layers (stereo redbook, stereo DSD, multichannel DSD) as discs: https://musicbrainz.org/release/df8fe008...1c745c09ad

Example of incomplete SACD release with no designation of layers: https://musicbrainz.org/release/640d3972...8a91ff34b8