[XXXBold]

Hello, I have some questions regarding Music management in Kodi

My situation

Disclaimer: I'm new to Kodi, not familiar how it work internally etc, however I've read some of the wiki pages already. I try to give a comprehensive overview about my setup / goals here, so that post might be a bit long...

I'm currently using Kodi for the following purposes:

• Play Video files (mostly .mkv / up to 1080p, h.264/h.265): All Video & Music files are located on a network drive (samba share, read-only) in different folders (the share is readonly for this system). For videos this works fine and I'm quite satisfied with that aspect.
  
• Play Audio files (mostly FLAC, some MP3, few M4a): In General it works, but I'm currently just testing stuff with a few Albums before processing/importing my whole library. I also plan to keep this file on the Network drive, like the video files (read-only, too), the size of my music library is probably around 200-300GB. Currently I manage my music library is on Quodlibet on my desktop PC, running Linux Mint. Quodlibet allows custom user ratings with a 5-Star system, AFAIK it stores the information in a local database and not the file tags itself. For Managing Tags, I mainly use mp3tag or Quodlibet directly.
  
• Play Videos from Youtube using the Kodi Addon: Works fine mostly
  
• Play Radio using the "Radio" Addon within Kodi: Works well so far
  

For Kodi itself I didn't configure anything special regarding the UI, using the default skin for now.

System Info:
Hardware:
OrangePi5 16GB SBC: http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/co...-Pi-5.html
->Connected to Network via Ethernet connection
->Connected to (old) Toshiba TV (FHD) via HDMI, which acts as display, but for playing Music is generally turned off
->Connected via USB to Rotel A12 Amplifier for Audio output

Software:

• Kodi v20.2 on armbian, Followed this guide to setup Hardware acceleration and stuff: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/25957-gu...dmi-audio/
  

Remote Control:

• Kore / Yatse App on Android Device
  
• Chorus2 Webinterface on PC Remote from Amplifier, using a FLIRC USB-IR Receiver on the OPI to control Kodi
  

Now my concerns / questions regarding the music library:

My goal is to at least display the Userrating of my music files (trackwise) withing kodi and use it for sorting etc, beeing able to rate within Kodi would just be a bonus.

Userrating should be usable / visible for:

• Most important: Kore/Yatse App, because that's what I use most for playing music, best would be 5-Star Rating that should be directly visible for each track
  
• Kodi on the TV, Maybe there's another skin for this? But if possible I'd like to stick to the default
  
• Chorus2 Webinterface
  

I'm taking https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Create_Music_Library as a reference, I hope this is recent information?
(I'm doing tests with just 3 Albums for now, before I retag & setup everything)

I've read that the recommended tagging software for Kodi is MusicBrainz Picard (https://kodi.wiki/view/Music_tagging).
So this seems to work fine for general tagging, but does it also allow to rate my tracks directly so Kodi will read them? There's the "Rating" feature which can be enabled but that stores the rating in a different tag (the e-mail address) it seems.

I know that it's possible to give each track in Kodi a "User Rating" (Contextmenu->Info->Rating), but this is very inconvenient for multiple tracks and not related with the file's tags. This userrating can be used in Yatse at least (), how about Kore? There's nothing visible there () For Movies there's a Star rating visible in Kore, for example (). Is that available for Musictracks, too?

Is there an option to read the rating from the file's tag and use it as Userrating in Kodi? Because my Music source in Kodi is read only (I could change that if I want to), that means I couldn't rate songs there directly, but that's not a big issue when I can do that otherwise by just updating the file's tags.

When searching for this topic, there's a lot of (outdated) information, and I can't really say what still applies and what not. I'm only interested in information that applies for Kodi >= 20.

I hope you understand what I mean and this wasn't too much of text.

If additional Information is required, let me know.

Thanks for your help & Regards,
XXXBold

[dubwat]

Kodi on TV?  Kodi was originally designed "for multiple operating-systems and hardware platforms, featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls."

IMHO, it's probably best to think of Kodi as a music player and use another app to manage your music metadata (incl ratings).  As you've pointed out, the Kodi userrating is stored locally so you can't export this metadata if you move your music to another platform.

I don't use the Kodi mobile apps but to display UserRating/My Rating in the default Estuary skin: Goto Interface --> Skin --> Configure Skin --> Choose Rating to Display --> My Rating

[XXXBold]

Thanks for your response. I try to use Kodi only as player so far. If possible, I'd like to use the rating embedded in the file tags (.flac, .mp3, .m4a) as the kodi user ratings, do you know if that is possible? For example an import option or something when adding a folder to the music library?

Thanks for the hint with the skin setting, it works. But is it possible to display it a bit more prominently? For now it only shows when the specific track is selected, but not in the file list. See this screenshot I made, with some annotations:

An equal solution for the apps would be nice to have, too.

[dubwat]

Yes, I use Musicbee (Windows only) to manage and rate my music.  The rating is stored 'inside' the file so it's there permanently.  The rating I give the music file in Musicbee is the one displayed in Kodi.

Re your screenshot, I've definitely seen a screenshot like that before but whether it was a suggestion or whether it was ever implemented, I can't recall.  Sorry.

[XXXBold]

Ah, okay, that's interesting. What file types do you manage & do you know what tags/scales are used for the rating with that software?
I think I could script that with MusicBrainz Picard (Rate X Function that writes the tag ($set()), https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/v2.7...c_set.html) when I know the correct tags.

Regarding the Screenshot / display of the Rating: Maybe it was a custom skin, or isn't it possible to edit a skin (I have no idea how that works)?

[Daydream]

Be careful, not all things are what they appear to be.
If I remember correctly mp3 ratings use a 0-255 scale and flac ratings a 1-100 scale. Regardless what various GUIs show. This gets complicated in a hurry when using tagging software outside of Kodi.

Say, if you have Rating = 3 in MP3tag for a flac file, Kodi will read it as '3 out of 100', round it down to 0 and show no stars for that file. And one could think "hey, but my file has rating, why doesn't it show?" when in fact Kodi shows "0 stars". If you rate the same file "60" in Mp3Tag and refresh it in Kodi, then suddenly it will show tagged with 3 stars rating (60 out of 100).

Now, if you take the same file and rate it 3 stars in MusicBee, this will do the conversion internally and will literally write a rating of 60 in the file, and the "3 stars" will appear in Kodi, effortlessly.

This can lead to much confusion, depending what software one uses to do the tagging. It's never a perfect situation, with various degree of technical debt (from the world of digital music at large, not Kodi team) going back to times immemorial regarding music tagging standards, if there are any.

So good luck with scripting from one source to the other, if possible.

[XXXBold]

Thanks for the hints. I think I found out now how Kodi handles the ratings for .flac with vorbis tags (I instruct Picard to remove IDv3 from flac files):
If the "RATING" Tag is present, it will be used in kodi (Scale from 1-100, Integer).

I thought it would be easy to write a script in Picard to convert the Ratings from quodlibet to this format.
For reference, Quodlibet uses a Scale from 0..1 (floating point, e.g. 0.0=zero stars, 0.8=4 stars, 1.0=5 stars) and stores it in a tag named "RATING:[email protected]" (Email address is configurable).
(I verify the tags by checking them using mp3tag)

So that means I could just read this tag, multiply it by 100 and store it in the "RATING"-tag.
Script for picard:

Code:

$set(RATING,$mul($get(RATING:[email protected]),100))

But it seems this doesn't work in Picard for 2 reasons: The "RATING:[email protected]"-tag can't be found/read for some reason and it seems the math functions don't work with floating point values... Any ideas?

[Daydream]

 Any ideas?

It doesn't work like that because this is voodoo territory, where only masters on non-Aristotelian logic can make sense of stuff. 
The only way I can get Picard to do something is like this

Code:

$set(RATING,$mul(%_rating%,20))

_rating being the variable that MB uses when users set the rating in Picard. I think it only works like that - writing out Rating tags set in itself or pulled from MB servers. I've never seen anybody able to make it read previously set ratings, from some other program.

[XXXBold]

Ah damn that's frustrating. Anyway, I managed to do it using mp3tag:

mp3tag tag-tag conversion:
Field: RATING

# Check first if Rating from QL exists, and if it's 1.0, then set 100, otherwise remove '0.' prefix and append 0 at the end. If rating doesn't exist, don't set anything.

Formatstring: $if(%RATING:[email protected]%,$if($eql(%RATING:[email protected]%,1.0),100,$right(%RATING:[email protected]%,1)0),)

However, I need to take care to do this after tagging with Picard, because it removes the RATING:[email protected], even if instructed to keep it (funny though, PLAYCOUNT:[email protected] is recognized and kept properly)