These smart phone and tablet remote apps are awesome. The ease of browsing your library and adding songs to the playlist (queue) without interrupting track playback is wonderful. It’s an absolute game changer for music playback. Instant access to any of thousands of tracks!
Album art on most skins comes from a file in the tracks album folder named: folder.jpg
Kodi groups ‘album tracks’ by the album artist and album name. So this gives you the option to have an album artist of ’Various Artists’ called ‘70s Quad Hits’ with each track’s artist tag as the actual artist: e.g ‘Pink Floyd’ or ‘Chicago’ etc
In Kodi you can search and display by ’artist’ even if the song is in a compilation album of ‘various artists’.
That’s the theory behind its implementation.
I think Garry alluded to this, but in Kodi go to:
System: Settings: Music: Library, there is the choice of "Include artists who appear only on compilations".
By NOT checking this box, I think you'll get the desired result. For example, for "Band on the Run", the album artist is Paul McCartney, and the artist is Paul McCartney & Wings. So "Paul McCartney & Wings" does NOT show up in my list of artists when the above referenced setting is unchecked. All my McCartney albums, regardless of the name he was using, are under "Paul McCartney".
For compilations, the album artist is "Various Artists" and I never see most of the names of the individual track artists in my list. However, the Kodi Music Remote app on my iPad allows me to change this setting on the fly, so all of a sudden I can see that I actually have several songs by Donna Summer even though I don't have any of her albums.
I think this setting will get the result you want.
Thank you so much, this is the setting that fixed exactly what I was grumbling about. My number of album artists went from 1,700(ish) down to 800(ish) after I flipped the switch, just to show you how much redundancy it eliminated!
You may have already checked this, but just in case you didn't or in case someone new to PC playback is reading, check your soundcard settings:
Actually I'm running Linux (as detailed at the beginning of this thread) and when you go in to the Sound properties thing it doesn't show or allow you to set sampling rate. Presumably it's just 'flexible' and set by whatever application has control of the audio device at the time. Kodi on Linux uses a driver called
PulseAudio for audio and video output, and I'm not sure if it's set this way by default, or if I triggered it by messing with the fixed/optimised/best match audio output thing, but anyway in the System Settings -> Audio Output section, one of the options is 'Limit Sampling Rate (kHz)' and for whatever reason it was set to 48.0 by default. I bumped it up to 192.0 and my problem seems to be gone.
Steelydave, I suspect the DSF conversion in Kodi maybe fixed at 16/48 but interested to follow what you find.
I’ve been thinking of adding a batch conversion of SACD ISOs to DSF and/or FLAC in Music Media Helper to ear the pain of converting many ISOs. I’ll need to do a bit more investigation but it’s probaly feasible.
I didn't get much time to play with it today, but I think it may be outputting DSD at 24/48 - one thing I did notice is that when I bumped up the sample rate limit (as outlined above) to 192kHz that it seemed to eliminate that static at the start of multichannel DSD tracks that I was complaining about yesterday. I'll do some more testing with some other discs and update on this later.
I'd prefer to keep my DSD tracks as DSD, in the optimistic hopes that someday I'll be able to afford a DSD-capable external DAC. Even 24/48 transcoded-on-the-fly by Kodi PCM will do for now, I'd rather that than spend months converting all my SACD ISOs to FLAC only to have a cheap DSD DAC come along. I never understood why OPPO didn't just take the D/A guts from the 103 or 105 (or 203/205), add a USB input and sell it as a multichannel DSD/PCM DAC for $350 or something. They'd have the market cornered, as all the other multichannel DACs seem to start at about 3x-4x that price.
I'm not sure if this is a sensitive thing to post here or not...but just as a side note, the Oppo BDP-103 with modded firmware will play all types of ISO's (including SACD) over SMB network.
I don't think it's off-limits as talking about ripping and converting is fine too as long as links to pirated/bootleg stuff isn't shared. I have considered this avenue as I have a 103, but I've held off so far for a few reasons - the main one is that my 103 is a bit tempramental, I got it from a scratch and dent sale for $200 because it had some big heavy object dropped on it, and sometimes it doesn't want to turn on. Which brings me to my second point, I don't know if I want to send money to someone in China for the modded firmware in the first place, especially with the added risk that my 103 may just stop working of its own accord one of these days. The other reason I haven't gone with the 103 as my output device is that as far as I know there's no gapless playback via DLNA, and also going that root of DLNA host/renderer just makes things a bit more sluggish, the buffering across the network etc and I'm really enjoying how fast everything is with my NUC at the moment. Like I said above, if OPPO did a cheap 5.1 or 7.1 DAC based on the guts of their disc players with a USB input, I'd be the first one on board to buy one.
So my problem today has to do with artist and album metadata/thumbnail/artwork scraping using Kodi's built-in
Universal Scraper. I did the scraping process as outlined (which is easy, to scrape artist info, go in to music ->artists and right click on any artist and pick 'Query info for all artists' - album scraping is the same, just go in to albums, right click and repeat the same process) and it worked well for some of my stuff, but not all of it.
My music library is divided in to a few main FLAC folders:
CD_Rips (16/44.1 FLAC)
DVDA_Rips (everything PCM higher than CD sampling rate, both stereo and multichannel)
Needledrops (a small amount of stuff ripped from vinyl in various sample rates)
Now my tagging process is that the stuff in CD_Rips is tagged "normally", so lets say we're dealing with Donald Fagen's 'Kamakiriad' album. I have the CD rip of it in flac, and I also have the hi-res stereo and 5.1 in the DVDA_rips folder. The version in CD_Rips just has the album title 'Kamakiriad', but to differentiate the versions in the DVDA_Rips folder, I tagged the album titles as 'Kamakiriad (96/24 Stereo)' and 'Kamakiriad (96/24 5.1 Surround)'.
The problem I run in to is the scraper only understands album if they have the exact album title - so it knows what 'Kamakiriad' is, but 'Kamakiriad (96/24 Stereo)' or 'Kamakiriad (96/24 5.1 Surround)' are unknown albums to it. So for albums it's fine with all my CD Rips, but all my hi-res stuff it has no idea about because I've put info in brackets after the album title. It also affects artist scraping for artists where I have no CD Rips, like Beck for example - I only have his surround sound releases, and the scraper doesn't know what any of them are, because the albums are tagged like 'Guero (48/24 Stereo)', 'Guero (48/24 5.1 Surround)' etc. So for those artists the scraper doesn't populate their entry with thumbnails and biographies etc.
In all the playback software I've used from foobar to jriver (and kodi is no different), appending something in brackets showing the sample rate/channel config to the album title was the only way to make each different version of the album show up as it's own album, even if the software had the facility to display the number of channels or sample rate in the library browser or playback screen.
If I tagged all the different versions of 'Kamakiriad' as just the album title (with no notation of them being hi-res stereo, or 5.1 or whatever) if I went in to the album in Kodi it would just show as one album, with 3 versions of each track number. In short it would be a mess, and I'm happy with the way I've done all my tagging. Not only that, I have something in the neighbourhood of 15,000 high-res tracks of various types, all tagged in that (samplerate/bitdepth number-of-channels) style, everything from (48/24 Mono) to (96/24 Quadraphonic) to (192/24 5.1 Surround) etc. and I don't want to have to change any or all of them.
So the (long-winded) question is, is there any way to get Kodi's Universal Album Scraper and Universal Artist Scraper to ignore the bracketed text at the end of the album title, or do I have to get on the Kodi forum and beg the developer to add it as a feature? It seems like it would be useful beyond my specific needs, ie people tagging CDs with stuff like '(Deluxe Edition)' etc. that would throw off the scraper. I'd even be willing to just put up with a sort of manual solution akin to when you look up tag info in a program like mp3tag, like if I could look up 'Beck' myself and then apply his artist entry to my Beck folder in Kodi, but I can't seem to find any way to do that at the moment. It seems like an all-or-nothing proposition because it's so automated, either your tags are perfect and the scraper works, or your tags are non-standard (like mine) and it doesn't.
I know that one solution is putting the artist.jpg file in the root folder for each artist, but using the scraper gives you way more info - in addition to the artist thumbnail you get a background image, biography and a bunch of genre tags and other metadata info (genre, years active, etc.) that makes things even more useful. I'd really like to have all that stuff for the artists that are missing it in my library now.
