[black_eagle]

I like seeing the individual albums so I separate them

You can see them individually.....





Also, if you insist on messing with the musicbrainz tags, you're not going to be able to do something like this, which shows Marillion's Misplaced Childhood - The original release, the 2 cd re-release and the 4 cd box-set re-master.





The whole point of tagging with musicbrainz is so that Kodi can distinguish between all these things - different artists with the same name, different albums with the same name or different releases / sets etc. Changing the tags kind of defeats the whole object as far as I can see. I mean, why tag with musicbrainz if you're then going to change them ? Might as well not tag with them in the first place.....

Perhaps it's just me, but I really don't follow the logic of that. It'd be much better, if something isn't working from your point of view to say, "I have A, B and C. I want A and B to be displayed like .... but C to be .....". Not saying it will make anything change, but there might already be ways to achieve some (or even all) of it and it has to better than constantly swimming against the tag tide.

[mister_eff]

Edit: Bleh, I like things a certain way. That's enough justification.

I think one big thing is that I didn't know that Kodi uses the MusicBrainz ID tags for its cataloguing, even when browsing by folder; I thought it would only be informational, at least for my uses. That is one reason I have run into issues that I did not expect: I'm not trying to browse by library, but I'm still not independent of the library system. Now I am trying to learn the library system both so I can browse by folder the way I want to, and perhaps to eventually set up nodes so I can browse by the library. But first I have to "fix" how things have been set-up so they're both okay for me and okay for Kodi.

I also might be obsessive compulsive and I like to do things a certain way because it feels "right" to me, even if it's not "optimal". MusicBrainz adds a lot of information and does a lot of things I like, but there are lots of little things that I'd still do differently (like not having "5.1 Mix" at the end of %title% tags, or wanting classical music titles tagged the same way across different releases instead being tagged slightly differently depending. on. the. release.). I don't think I'm crazy for wanting to modify some things while still liking the unique IDs for everything that MusicBrainz provides.

The extra information is the appeal of MusicBrainz. That's why I am going through the trouble of incorporating it. I actually have experimented with a separate Kodi installation and trying to browse things by library as you've suggested, and that's how I found out what the problem was with the album art that I mentioned. Maybe I just haven't learned everything, but there are still things I have seen about Kodi/MusicBrainz and things that you have shown me that I don't like/are not satisfactory for me.
 

You can see them individually.....

I meant at the same "level" as the the rest of the artist's releases. Like if I had some individual release of John Lennon's Imagine and the version that's on Signature Box, those are under 2 different Release Groups, so to choose between one or the other, I'd have to dig into different subdirectories (at least with my experimentation).

Also, if you insist on messing with the musicbrainz tags, you're not going to be able to do something like this, which shows Marillion's Misplaced Childhood - The original release, the 2 cd re-release and the 4 cd box-set re-master.

I already see different versions/remasters of the same album next to each other, because that's how I've sorted my music.


My point with compilations was just that it was an observation I had that led me to diagnose one of the issues I was having: Kodi was mixing up album art with artist art because I had different album titles with the same release ID. Kodi/MusicBrainz needing a 1:1 relationship between the two is something I did not know, and I thought was worth pointing out.

My other point with my last post was that I'd still run into the original issue I had because of my SACD ripping, even if I never changed anything MusicBrainz did. Many SACD entries on MusicBrainz have not separated the CD, stereo DSD, and multichannel DSD layer. So If I were to rip an SACD and tag it through MusicBrainz, I'd have to modify the tags in some way or another. Either I'd append the multichannel mix at the end of the album (manually recreating the way MusicBrainz does things by default), or I'd assign 2 different albums (the stereo and multichannel mix) to the same Album/ReleaseID. I dislike the former, so I did the latter and ran into the issues that I've mentioned (Kodi mixing up albums).

[Sylfest]

Many SACD entries on MusicBrainz have not separated the CD, stereo DSD, and multichannel DSD layer.

You can always login to Musicbrainz to add and edit the releases.

[mister_eff]

You can always login to Musicbrainz to add and edit the releases.

Thanks for the suggestion. Yeah, had this thought the other day. It probably would have made more sense when I was adding MusicBrainz tags to my rips. I'll probably go back and do it at some point. I'm so burned out on music library stuff and I'd need to learn how to use the website though, so there are many obstacles to doing it right now, though.

No, burned out is not the right word. I'm beyond frustrated, both with Kodi and MusicBrainz. It feels like there is no room to personalize my collection in any way. I'm afraid to capitalize letters in tags now. I feel like if I want to continue to use Kodi, I need to delete tags that I've had set for 20+ years and change to a system with a lot of formatting styles that I don't like. I've been using Kodi since it was XBMC but now it doesn't feel right. Incorporating the Kodi library is just impossible for me. I've wasted so much time this week trying to get the library to work, and I think in order to actually get it to work with my library, I'd have to spend another month doing nothing but continue to work on it. I guess I'm just a neanderthal luddite retard stuck in the 20th century of browsing music. I might as well just delete all my MB-specific tags or something.

I just can't do this anymore. I feel like I'm killing myself trying to get Kodi to work and it's not worth it.

[Sylfest]

Yes, it's a small learning curve to musicbrainz, take your time and do it right, when ever the time suits you.

[mister_eff]

I think the library system just isn't for me, and now I'm having an existential crisis with Kodi, and I've been using it since XBMC. I just can't deal with this troubleshooting right now. Bye.

[HomerJau]

@mister_eff Kodi works fine without MusicBrainz tags in most cases.

I started using MB Artist IDs only to differentiate artists with similar names. Then later to do same for Album releases by same artist (the usual example, ‘Pink Floyd The Dark Side of the Moon’ - quad, 5.1, Atmos releases). But this was to make Kodi scan faster not for me to use while navigating Kodi UI. Having different Album (title) tags separates the albums, or the relatively new DiscSubtitle tag works well too.

But scanning an album title that’s not a direct match (without MBIDs) becomes very slow as Kodi seems to try to find data on line for a title that does not exist e.g The Dark Side of the Moon (Atmos). Adding a MB Release ID ensures near instant scan. It’s not critical that the correct ReleaseID is used, just that each album uses a different ReleaseID.

What I’m trying to say is: IMO you only need MusicBrainz Artist IDs and ReleaseIDs for a small number of albums, where Artist Names need disambiguation and for Albums from same artists with multiple releases if you want to speed music ‘deep scanning’. That for me is less than 5% of my collection. (But I’ve actually added MB IDs to most now anyway).

Musicbrainz track ID: I’m not sure what this is used for. For me MB ArtistIDs (for track Artist and AlbumArtist), and MB ReleaseID is all that’s needed for those 5% of albums mentioned above. It’s not a huge effort to sort out those.

[jorisd]

Tagging with mbids allows things like this

Hello all, new kodi user and forum member here.

Sorry to post on an old thread but I'd like to know how to achieve this view display in kodi, e.g. an artist image with optional bio and album thumbs next to it. Which skin and view settings to use? It looks like confluence which is the one I use but I don't see any view settings that can enable this. I have the artist grid list with their picture thumbnails, then when I click an artist I have all associated album cover thumbs, but can't get both artist pic and albums on a nice display like this.

Or maybe you have to build nodes with the node editor, I have yet to explore this feature so I don't know.

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Joris

[black_eagle]

Hi, that's the default Estuary skin (the one that Kodi ships with), showing the artist Peter Gabriel selected.  The view type (changed in the left sideblade menu) is info wall. 

There are multiple ways to get the required info into Kodi but probably the easiest is to follow the guide in the wiki here -> https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Create_Music_Library

I'd suggest.

1) Tag your files with musicbrainz picard.  Might be a small learning curve in the beginning but it will pay dividends later.  Make sure to add the 'albumartists' tag as specified here. 
2) Turn on this setting.  It will fetch artist bio's and album info automatically although you should bear in mind the caveats on that page.  All this comes from the internet so can be a slow process at times.  You can however still use the music library while the scrape is running.