[idoko]

AFAICS Kodi doesn't offer the possibility to add metadata to audio files.

There is no "audio.nfo" file to add additional (or non existing) metadata to mp3 (or other audio) files.

Some mp3 (or other audio) files have no tags or incorrect tags/metadata. A "audio.nfo" file would be very helpful.

In some scenarios it is not possible to edit the tags of a mp3 file.

A possible solution could be:
- whenever an audio file exists (e.g. "filename.mp3") it is indexed to the library (this is already available in kodi)
- check whether a file "filename.nfo" exists in the same directory and override the tags (album, artist, etc.) of "filename.mp3" in the library.

[jjd-uk]

Why not simply correct the embedded tags? as unlike the video library correct tagging is essential for the music library.

[idoko]

As already mentioned there are scenarios where changing the embedded tags is not wished or even possible.

Sometimes there are license issues that do not allow to change the files.

Another scenario is when you want the mp3 file to keep the information consistent with some external database but you want your library have some other information.

Example:
According to the information of the publisher, following names of the same composer are found in different mp3:

- Georg Friedrich Händel
- George Frideric Handel
- Georg Friedrich Haendel

You don't want to change them because you need the mp3 keep the original tags

But you would like to have all indexed by e.g. "Händel".

Similar cases are found whenever publishers mix composer and interpret under the "interpret" tag.

[black_eagle]

As already mentioned there are scenarios where changing the embedded tags is not wished or even possible.

Sometimes there are license issues that do not allow to change the files.

Another scenario is when you want the mp3 file to keep the information consistent with some external database but you want your library have some other information.

Example:
According to the information of the publisher, following names of the same composer are found in different mp3:

- Georg Friedrich Händel
- George Frideric Handel
- Georg Friedrich Haendel

You don't want to change them because you need the mp3 keep the original tags

But you would like to have all indexed by e.g. "Händel".

Similar cases are found whenever publishers mix composer and interpret under the "interpret" tag.

Tag your stuff with Musicbrainz Picard then, which can handel (see what I did there !!) different spellings but will put them all under a unique mbid which Kodi reads and understands.

See this page -> https://musicbrainz.org/artist/27870d47-...fc/aliases  which lists all the aliases for your composer under the one mbid.  So whichever spelling your tags use, Kodi will understand that they are one and the same person.

[idoko]

Thanks for mentioning MusicBrainz.

But (as already mentioned) I search a way to NOT modify the embedded tags in the audio files but instruct Kodi to read the tags from other sources like an *.nfo file.

In my opinion using NFO-files could be also an elegant way to also indexing audio streams into the library. Which AFAIK they cannot be indexed.

[scott967]

I can see there can be a use case for this, kind of an extension of cuesheet functions, but that's going to be a pretty massive change, would take a real dedicated dev to pull it off (Dave Blake put a lot and I mean a lot of effort into the tag reading aspects of Kodi; this seems at least that much work).

scott s.
.

[idoko]

Another use case is indexing a library based on a smb-share with thousands (in our case about 8.000) of audio-files with average 50MB.

As far as I understand it, every file must be copied from the smb-share to the kodi device to extract the mp3-tags.

With a audio.nfo file (plus an algorithm that priorizes it and ignores the mp3-tags) only the audio.nfo file must be copied from the smb-share.

[jjd-uk]

As far as I understand it, every file must be copied from the smb-share to the kodi device to extract the mp3-tags.

Not the case at all, Kodi will read the embedded tags from the music files whatever their location.