Large music database management

Hello,
I have a large music database, and after spending quite some time tagging it with MusicBrainz Picard, I imported it into XBMC. Great. However, it really is so large, if I don't have a precise idea of what I am looking for it really is hard to find anything. For instance, even if I search by Genre, I have 230 entries: way too much.
What would be nice is the possibility of using extra tags as proposed by many taggers and music players. There are tempo tags, mood tags, etc.
One useful tag is the Grouping tag (MB Picard w/ Last.fm plugins sets it for instance), which basically says which "broad genre" a music piece is. So while its genre may be Swamp Rock and Underground, its Grouping Tag will say "Rock". This means we could have a two-tier genre filtering: first by Grouping, then by Genre in the Grouping. Here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=70289 the poster suggests a similar idea, but in which we group the genre tags by hand. A good idea too.
Any way, one should be able to easily find all artists/albums in a given grouping or sub-genre. Navigation with my remote is totally impossible, I currently *have* to use the web interface and cannot believe something simpler is not feasible.
Also being able to see albums in a genre directly, instead of going through the artist selection would be nice.
Of course, I would also like the "occasion", "mood", "tempo" tags to be accessible.
Basically, it would be nice to be able to setup viewing filters based on any tag we want, be it grouping, genre, etc, and view by artist or album. If I could easily access all my albums which are of a given style, for a given occasion or mood, this would be nice

Compilations might also be present directly in the Library instead of having to go to Artists/Various Artists

Any non-hack way to include singles and easily and rapidly create playlists of singles would be appreciated, not having found a proper way yet, I have hundreds of songs sitting by, sad not to be played. For instance, I have lots of Christmas music, random singles and I don't want to be polluting my DB with them, yet I would love to be able to access them all easily. Only way I have figured which might allow this would be to create fake "albums", destroying the original metadata. However, this is far from ideal, and hard to maintain in automatic tagging software...

Finally, if it is possible to add these features through python scripting, I am open to contributing, but I don't really feel like recreating an entire music library manager From what I saw in the docs, it doesn't seem trivial to add new sorting features to the existing library (but I could be wrong there)

Thanks to all the devs for a great product anyways

Compilations already have a separate node, as do singles (album tag is blank).

You can group any way you like using the existing metadata via smartplaylists - these can give you an album listing without Christmas and Singles for instance. I personally just use the genre tag (multiple genres per song) as a way to filter most things down. The comment tag is also available should you wish to have a different field to filter on.

Ideally in the future we'd allow more tags to be read than we do and we'd also ideally have an easier to use filter and grouping mechanisms. We have some ideas for these, and we're probably going to do it on the video side first, as for most people, the music side works quite nicely already - it's only when you have very large amounts of music that things get a little cumbersome.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Hello, and thanks for the quick reply!

About compilations, I know I can find them all under Artists/Various Artists, but in my version of XBMC at least (9.11), there is not Compilations node directly at the root in the library. I was merely saying this could be useful.

Also, for improving imports, it would be nice if we could have multiple separators. When automatically tagging artists, I get things like "&", ";" and "," separators in artist names, which I would appreciate being able to use all as separators instead of having to pick one.

As for smart playlists, I did try using them, but there is no access to many of the useful tags I mentioned above. Filtering out what I don't want to see using a remote is really a tedious process, and doesn't allow for easy music selection. And moving "proper" tags such as "Grouping" into the comment section really would be a pain. First this means my tags are no longer in sync with "official" tagging databases, which has lots of implications (ie, moving files based on tags is risky and at any time, I may lose my commenting, etc). Second, it doesn't feel right: I have a legitimate tag, and am removing it to put into a comment. Third, this implies I have to write my own retagging scripts just to have the music be imported properly (no way I am retagging thousands of albums by hand).

Also, when would you imagine these new features you talk about might be integrated?
Thanks!

There are no official tags other than the ones we use. The only other tags are ones folk have made up themselves. Given that there's no standard for this stuff, IMO it's kinda useless to include things by default unless it's done in a very generic way. It's non-trivial to do this at this point, but if you wish to give it a crack you'll need some SQL knowledge and some C/C++ knowledge.

We can't give an ETA on new features - we don't know ourselves how long it's gonna take

Cheers,
Jonathan