Kodi Community Forum

Is it possible to set that xmbc shows album artist only and not quest artists?

I have some music tracks that have quest artists performing. Those artist are tagged as track artist(s) by mediamonkey. Example:


pic1

in xbmc's music settings naming template is:
[%n.] A% - %T

Result:

pic2

well, as you can see, there're multiple artists showing there. I'd like to have only album artist (in this case Lindsey Stirling <3) and not quest artists showed. Is it possible to set that xmbc shows album artist only? It looks kind of messy when multiple artist are there... I like clean and simple titles.

wiki says:

Quote: 6.1 Artist Tags - Resolving Compilations and Multiple Artists

XBMC reads the Album Artist tag in ID3, Ogg, APE and MP4 tags and uses it if available to assign an artist to the album (independently of the track's artist information). This is the "Album Artist" tag (in ID3 this is represented by the "TPE2" tag; in vorbiscomment (ogg) files "ALBUMARTIST", "ALBUM ARTIST" and "ENSEMBLE" are all supported). Multiple artists for either a track or album artist can be specified in "Artist1 / Artist2 / Artist3" format.

I use semicolon to separate multiple artists and genres. advancedsettins.xml:

The semicolon is immediately after the artist name, try

artist name ; artist name

so there is a space either side of the semicolon

Edited based on some more thought:

I "think" that the way your FLAC tags are being saved is semicolon space.

Assuming all your music is in FLAC format files, change your advancedsettings:
that is, semicolon space. You should also have the same problem with your genres before this change. If you also have music in MP3 format, this may cause problems since most MP3 formats use ID3 2.3 version tag format, and you might find that "semicolon space" isn't what actually is saved into the artist tag, so Kodi won't realize that there are multiple artists in the artist frame.

But looking at your screen shot maybe it isn't saved as semicolon space but rather just semicolon.

scott s.
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Thank you very much for your replies! Unfortunately, I think editing advancedsettings.xml doesn't solve the issue.

To make things easier, I made a test folder with a test track. Now there's just one flac file plus artwork in my music folder. After testing some variations of advancedsettings.xml it seems to me very likely that <itemseparator></itemseparator> has influence on user interface only. It affects only what mark or symbol is between the artists and doesn't affect how kodi reads tags of the track. Otherwise genres should be screwed also but they are not. See below





Genres and artists are read just fine in library mode.




See, no issues with genres or artists in library. So at least genres are tagged right by mediamonkey... can it be that mediamonkey does fine job tagging genres but whenn it comes to tagging artists all the hell breaks loose?
I think that mediamonkey tags artists and genres right and kodi reads tags right. The problem is just how kodi presents info on it's user interface. It cannot make difference between album artist and artist. Or am I completely wrong?

I tried to delete <itemseparator></itemseparator> from advancedsettings.xml and looked if genres and artists tags work with default settings and yes it works (see below). So no need to edit <itemseparator></itemseparator> .

Track:


genres:


artists:


Everything is read fine but the way kodi shows artists in the title is something I don't like. Too many artists in title looks just messy. Please, correct me if I have misunderstood anything 'cos still after couple of years using xbmc/kodi feel I'm kind of a noob. Thank you for your help.

I had this, so re-tagged the music with musicbrainz compatible tagger, and removed all other artists. Rescan gone only the main artist remains.

Made some extra testings with logitech squeezebox touch player. Squeezebox can read all tags right. It can separate album artist and track artists and show only album artist when I browse my library with ipad. Clean and simple. So the problem is not tag related, isn't it? Then is it kodi related issue?

scott967 Wrote:If you also have music in MP3 format, this may cause problems since most MP3 formats use ID3 2.3 version tag format...

You're right. Thank you for the info. Very much appreciated. Tried with mp3 file and that didn't work. Squeezebox couldn't separate multiple artists when the file was mp3. Luckily almost all of my music files are either flac or m4a. But there are some exceptions, though. Any ideas how to get mp3 working or should I change the file format of them to flac or something else? EDIT: before anyone says I know i cannot change lossy file to lossless and gain more quality. Changing the format would be just 'cos of the tagging.

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(2014-08-20, 10:59)uNiversal Wrote: [ -> ]I had this, so re-tagged the music with musicbrainz compatible tagger, and removed all other artists. Rescan gone only the main artist remains.

But then you lost all quest artist metadata? That cannot be a solution for a serious music collector. Tracks should be tagged so that if you only remember the vocalist but not the album artist or main artist, you should still be able to find that track by typing that vocalist in the search bar. At least I think that way... don't know what others have in their mind

Im not serious music collector, all my serious stuff, is on vinyl or other physical media, media center is more of a general library for easy access. Its not a perfection audiophile, metadataholic job.

You welcome to pursue any degree of perfection you want, it was a suggestion some random comment not meant to be taken too seriously, ignore it

btw the individual tracks remain with the artists that share those tracks, nothing else.

It's even easier to acceess when tagging is done with care. Especially with digital audio i see huge benefit in there. Your suggestion is one way, nothing wrong in it.

I got mp3 files working using mp3tag software. Double backslash between different genres and artists was the solution.

But, kodi still shows all artists of the track and not just the album artist. If anyone find a solution, share. I'll try to figure this out later and report here if any progress is made. Perhaps i can learn to live with it if there's no easy answer. In the end it's just a minor flaw.

If your tags are perfect (you are absolutely sure this is so) and you are running the very latest kodi out there, helix v13 alpha3, it could simply be a limitation or a bug. Only a developer can answer that, though you should provide then logs and detailed information of taggers used etc. My solution fixed it because indeed I was really wanting not to have 50 artists anywhere that I dont have albums for, especially when viewing via artists, what I did maybe not completely right, but it is what it is.

I also used mediamonkey for my music tagging and playing and always had Track Name, Album Artist, Album Name and Track Number as the ONLY tags that were saved as I hated seeing multiple artists or just a generic display difference between mp3 players. I recently switched over to MusicBrainz and although it's not straightforward or easy to get (at first) it has been AWESOME at tagging my media, letting me know what I have missing as well as informing me on whether or not there is another version of that album that was released. The tagging has been, for lack of a better word, PERFECT! In the options, under tags I have the following options checked:

Before Tagging:
Clear existing tags
Remove ID3 tags from FLAC files
Remove APEv2 tags from MP3 files

Tag Compatibility:
ID3v2 version: 2.4


I spent about 3 hours total tagging, double checking and testing my 30,000 song collection. Once you figure out the way it works, it's very simple to use and very efficient. Make sure you check the metadata options before you start scraping as that can save you some interesting head scratches.

@weidinin A cheap and nasty workaround might be to specify the separator to be a large number of spaces, so that the guest artists are shifted off the screen e.g.


I know it isn't an elegant solution but it probably does what you want.

What I do in my music is use "space slash space" that is " / " as my separator in all files. In MP3 I use MP3Tag to convert all ID3 tags to APEv2 tags and use the prioritseapetags setting in advancedsettings.xml. This gets around the ARTIST (TPE1) field problem.

scott s.
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