Musicbrainz-chaos
#31
(2014-02-01, 10:19)jmarshall Wrote: I'd suggest using MBID when it makes sense to do so (i.e. it's on MB) and not using it when not.

XBMC does not require it to be there. If you have an artist in your database with MBID already set and a song comes along from the same artist without MBID set, then it'll use the MBID for that artist. Same applies to albums. Similarly, if you have an artist in your database without MBID and a song comes along from the same artist with MBID set, then that artist will now have an MBID.

The only case you get problems are multiple (different) MBIDs for the same artist or album.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Ah, we are comming closer to a possible solution. What you are saying is, that albums with songs having no MB-IDs will not be separated but listet under the same artist together with the other albums consisting of songs that do have a MB ID if the "Album Artists"-tag shows the same name. Only if they have different MB-IDs they will get split, even if the Album Artist-tag shows the same name. Is that correct? Comming back to my examples this would mean:
No 1: Tag the files with Picard to have MB IDs for the album artist "Camouflage" and the respective albums
No 2: Just tag the files with the same Album Artist-Name, but no MB-IDs
No 3: Just tag the files with the same Album Artist-Name, but no MB-IDs (or tag them with Picard to also have MB-IDs?)
No 4: Just tag the files with the same Album Artist-Name, but no MB-IDs
And all albums above and their respective songs would be listed under the same artist named "Camouflage". The artist would have biographies (taken from Musicbrainz) and the albums of case no 1. would even show album information (taken from Musicbrainz). Is that correct?

No.5: Tag the files with Picard to have MB IDs for this sampler
No 6: Just tag the files with the same Album Artist-Name ("Various Artists"), but no MB-IDs
And all albums above and their respecitve songs would be listed under the same artist name "Various Artists" (or under "Samplers"). Various Artists would probably show no biography, but the album of case no. 5 would show the album information. Ist that correct?

Therefor conclusion would be: Do not tag single files with MB-IDs, only complete albums that have the "original" setup. Leave the other songs with no MB IDs (even if the single song could be recognized).
And that results in: You only have MB IDs in songs of your "original" albums and no MB IDs in songs of selfmade-compilations or other "problematic sceanarios" (like the ones I mentioned).


(2014-02-01, 20:58)Rovastar Wrote: I had a look at these files. I am no expert on the new XBMP (I'll always refer to it as that too old school) system and the scraping but I think I do know MusicBrainz fairly well.

For the Camouflage ones.

I see all the "MusicBrainz Artist Id"s as the same bc6b7d82-1d7b-4f48-b742-d32936f5d5c9 apart from those 2 tracks that you have chosen not to assign any MB tags to (i found them easily in the database so not sure why you could not find them)

You have assigned one of the tracks to a Various Artist compilation so the
"MusicBrainz Release Artist Id" is different in this case for this one track. i.e. the album artist

I am not sure how the devs are using MB artist id tags "MusicBrainz Artist Id" vs "MusicBrainz Release Artist Id" but it could explain the difference here. Maybe that is something to look at but it depends on your behaviour of your app do you want to look at the album artist tag or the art tag?

All the others the explanations seem straight forward.

Hi Rovastar, thanks for your reply as well. You are saying that two of my files do not have MB ID at all (though you might have found them at musicbrainz). Well, I used Picard and pressed "cluster", then "lookup" and for the remaing files "scan". But it seems it did not get me IDs for those two files. However, following Jonathan's statement those two files should be listed under same "Camouflage".artist like the ones with the correct MB IDs because they do not have a conflict MB ID but the same Album Artist-tag. You are also saying I only had one Camouflage-song with a MB ID referring to the Album Artist "Various Artists" (though the "Album Artist"-tag definitly said "Camouflage"). That probably occured because Picard took the respective ID from a sampler, not an official album. Following Jonathans statement this is a conflict MB ID and therefore would be listed separately. But both entries' names would still be taken from their tag-fields for "Album Artist" (not form their MB IDs). So this would give me two artists named "Camouflage" in my database then, But why did I actually get four(!) of them?

I am still puzzled and not sure if this can be handled easily by everyone.

Brgds,

FantasticN
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#32
Sorry I am wrong that they are in the Musicbrainz database they are not. Must have been half asleep when I wrote that and must have picked the wrong mix. Sorry about that.
I have actually added them to Musicbrainz now.

" However, following Jonathan's statement those two files should be listed under same "Camouflage".artist like the ones with the correct MB IDs because they do not have a conflict MB ID but the same Album Artist-tag."

So if there are not matched it has a guess. Ummh what about other artists with the name "Camouflage" (there are 4 in musicbrainz.) how do you know what one to go for. I imagine they should be separate.

"So this would give me two artists named "Camouflage" in my database then, But why did I actually get four(!) of them?"

I imagine/guess that there are 4 different ones because:

1) and 2)
You have 2 tracks that didn't match tracks Me And You (Warp Acht E.Mix) and You Turn (Silent Night Mix). Therefore they have 2 separate artists for "Camouflage" (how do they know what "Camouflage" artist to assign them too when there are many Camouflage artists)
3)
5 tracks assigned to 2 releases for the "Camouflage" the proper ones. So these have 1 "MusicBrainz Release Artist Id" these are a separate artist.
4)
1 track Love Is a Shield (extended version) from the compilation/sampler Maxi Hits with a "MusicBrainz Release Artist Id" for the various artists

Are they the 4 artists you got? *shrug*
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#33
Quote:Only if they have different MB-IDs they will get split, even if the Album Artist-tag shows the same name. Is that correct?

Yup, the code when adding an artist is basically:

If new artist has MBID, check whether we have that MBID in the database. If so, we've found it, if not check whether we have a matching artist name in the database without a MBID. If so, add the MBID to that artist. If not, add a new artist.
If new artist does not have MBID, check whether we have a matching artist name in the database. If so, we've found it, if not we add a new one.

Proof:

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master....cpp#L1060

Smile
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#34
Hi Jonathan,

you are saying "..., if not check whether we have a matching artist name in the database. If so, add the MBID to that artist. If not, add a new artist".

But that would mean even if I had different MB IDs for Camouflage in those songs they would have had to be listed under one single entry called "Camouflage". But as a matter of fact I had four entries all called "Camouflage" in my database and the respective albums/songs were split between those. How come?

Brgds,

FantasticN
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#35
I missed out "without a MBID" from that sentence - have remedied.

If the existing "Camouflage" artist had a MBID already, then the new artist (with different MBID) would be a new artist.
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#36
Hi Jonathan,

I see. But that brings us back to Rovastar's question: What if s song does not have an MB-ID and the Album Artist-tag of that song matches two (ore more) Album Artists with the same tag, but different MB IDs (which could be a result of the system you just described)? Do you add this song/album to the first MB ID then or do you then create another entry with the Album Artist name for all songs/albums with no MB IDs?

Brgds,

FantasticN
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#37
Ok, adding Musicbrain IDs to my songs by using Picard not only messed up some of my tags (which I had to revert afterwards by using Tag&Rename as already explained). It also added some tag-fields to several songs I was not aware of, like Titlesort, Albumsort and Artistsort. Tag&Rename did not show them, I had to use MP3Tag to realize they were added. It seems that this also was part of the reason why my XBMC-library was such a chaos. E.g. after deleting those tag-fields in the sample-files I provided above I only get two artists named Camouflage, but not four anymore.

Now, I finally think that adding musicbrain-tags to an already tagged (big) music library not only creates much work, but also comes with the risk to cause some kind of mess (especially by running an half-automated tool like Picard) and therefore leads to even more work to finally correct it. And I also think that it will not even be possible to always add "correct" MB IDs to all songs, since these MB IDs always refer to a specified combination of songs, albums and artists that are officially available. But most libraries do included self-made compilations or somehow "amended" albums that do not comply with the static musicbrainz-database. As a result those songs will be allocated to various albums and that will lead to another kind of mess in the library.

However, since you will never be able to rely on all people having all their songs tagged with MB IDs you will always have to also scrape for the "regular" tags like "album artist", "album", "artist" and "title" and sort the songs based on these tags. Also in these cases you will have to get the metadata based on the regular tags. And because you will always have to maintain this "No-MB-ID"-scraping-system I can and will rely completely on it. That avoids much work (for a result without visbile advantage) and it provides for the flexibility I need in creating selfmade albums and compilations like I want to. But because you implemented that MB-ID scraping and have given them priority over the regular tags I from now on have to make sure that I delete those MB IDs in every song that I add to my library. That is what I have to keep in mind when using XBMC Gotham.

Once again thank you for your support and your patience in explaing the MB ID-scraping machanism of Gotham. That helped me very much in understanding the idea behind it and the advantages as well as the principle disadvantages.

Best regards,

FantasticN
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#38
Thats a pretty good summary of it.

Sorry If I missed it but can't you just turn off "override song tags" in the config?

The setting is a little difficult to understand. Wouldn't a "Read MusicBrainz tags" be better?
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#39
Hi zag,

thanks. I just hope it is not to "negative" as to the idea of using mudicbrainz-tags. However, I personally do not really see the advantages or at least would not say they outweigh the principle problems.

As to your question: As I understand this option currently does not really disable the usage of Musicbrainz IDs. These MB IDs are scraped and used for "sorting" anyway. And if you have conflicted IDs (like you will probably have when your albums are not all based on "official releases" but consist of self-made or amended compilations) you will then probably get the same album artist and/or album several times in your library. The only difference in enabling and disabling this option is: If this option is enabled, then the artists and albums will even be named after the names found in the Musicbrainz-library. If this option is disabled they will be named after the respective tags, but will still be sorted and listed following their Musicbrainz-IDs. So the only way to avoid the "mess" that I experienced is to consequently delete all MB IDs.

Brgds,

FantasticN
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#40
@fantasticn: The first artist that matches with MBID.
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#41
I've been reading these posts with interest, as I've just started to clean up a very large music library (3800+ Artists, 1700+ Music Albums). I've been using a combination of Musicbrainz Picard (for the MBID's, Genre, Artist, Album, etc) and MediaMonkey 4 for downloading Lyrics, and creating Various Artists compilations.

Speaking of Various Artists, I have numerous compilation folders (Billboard top 100, Songs from the 80's, etc), that wouldn't show up in Musicbrainz Picard. So I've been just using Musicbrainz Picard to populate the ID3v2.3 tags with (MBID's, Genre, Artist, Album, etc). Then I would pull the compilation in MediaMonkey, and clear off all the Album Art and assign a generic one for all the songs. Then change the Album Artist to "Various Artists" (but leaving the MBID's, Artist, Album, Genre, etc), and import this into XBMC Frodo v12.3.

There is that setting in XBMC to remove compilations from showing up under artists (which remove the Compilations from all other views except under the Artists/Various Artists Category. So when viewing songs under Various Artists \ Billboards Hits of 2013, each Artist has the correct Artist poster and Fanart, while showing my custom Album artwork. So far, this has worked out Great, and makes my Music section look Fantastic.

However, with this change to Gotham, I'm now concerned I will have to go and edit each track under the Various Artists section, removing the Musicbrainz info. Is this correct, or do you have some plans to leave Various Artists as Exempt from any kind of Musicbrainz Chaos?
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#42
I think it'll depend Smile

As long as the MBAlbumArtistId isn't set on those tracks you should be fine - the tracks will be assigned to their true artists (from Artist/MBArtistID) and also listed under their album artist (Various Artists).

I agree in principle that we should basically ignore MBArtistId's for "Various Artists", but I guess there's a potential fault where the MBID information might be correct (while the Artist information is not), though this would be unlikely I think?

Cheers,
Jonathan
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


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