2024-02-27, 13:36
I'm confused.
The official party line states that "Kodi has strong support for MusicBrainz tagging. It is highly recommended that users tag their music files using MusicBrainz Picard." Fine. But then why does Kodi use the " / " (space-slash-space) sequence to separate multiple values in one field, while Musicbrainz Picard uses the ";" (semicolon-slash) sequence for the same purpose?
Yes, Kodi's default separator can be overridden in advancedsettings.xml, but "strong support" and "mismatched default settings" don't strike me as a sensible combination! Shouldn't this be changed?
More flexibility in the separator sequence would be ideal; multiple separators would help (e.g. "/", " / " and "; " combined) could help to make it less of a PITA.
Then there's the fact that Musicbrainz is a user-populated database that uses free-form fields for a number of features, which compounds the problem considerably since this is a recipe for errors, inconsistencies and contradicting entries. Artist sort order, is a good example. A track that has "Above & Beyond feat. Zoë Johnston" in the artists field should not have "Beyond, Above feat. Johnston, Zoë" in its artist sort order field! (I imagine that Above & Beyond / Johnston, Zoë" would be the correct format.) Granted, that is essentially a MB issue and not a Kodi issue, but parsing these free-form entries better might help.
Just a few gripes thoughts...
// FvW
The official party line states that "Kodi has strong support for MusicBrainz tagging. It is highly recommended that users tag their music files using MusicBrainz Picard." Fine. But then why does Kodi use the " / " (space-slash-space) sequence to separate multiple values in one field, while Musicbrainz Picard uses the ";" (semicolon-slash) sequence for the same purpose?
Yes, Kodi's default separator can be overridden in advancedsettings.xml, but "strong support" and "mismatched default settings" don't strike me as a sensible combination! Shouldn't this be changed?
More flexibility in the separator sequence would be ideal; multiple separators would help (e.g. "/", " / " and "; " combined) could help to make it less of a PITA.
Then there's the fact that Musicbrainz is a user-populated database that uses free-form fields for a number of features, which compounds the problem considerably since this is a recipe for errors, inconsistencies and contradicting entries. Artist sort order, is a good example. A track that has "Above & Beyond feat. Zoë Johnston" in the artists field should not have "Beyond, Above feat. Johnston, Zoë" in its artist sort order field! (I imagine that Above & Beyond / Johnston, Zoë" would be the correct format.) Granted, that is essentially a MB issue and not a Kodi issue, but parsing these free-form entries better might help.
Just a few gripes thoughts...
// FvW