Music Media Helper (Tools for Multichannel Audio & Music Videos)

[MikeKL]

@HomerJAU MMH 9 beta 7's current implementation of Music Video mkv tagging appears to differ from Mp3tag & Foobar2000

I have performed an observational review of mkv tagged by MHH and compared results with an mkv tagged by Mp3Tag and Foobar2000 respectively.
(Using mkvtoolnix GUI's info tool to view relevant music video tags, being added to originating mkv by each app)

Essentially apps are adding/storing most typical music video tag values as follows.

Mp3tag & foobar2000 currently utilize tag target types 50 & 30, MHH utilizes target type 30
Reference "Target Types" table at https://www.matroska.org/technical/tagging.html/

MMH 9 Beta 7

Mp3tag v3.28

foobar2000 v2.1.4

And tagging being viewed for review/edit within respective apps

MMH 9 Beta 7

Mp3tag v3.28

foobar2000

Note: I cleaned originating *.mkv of any/all tags using mkvpropedit before adding the expected Music video tags with MHH, mp3tag and foobar2000 apps.
(To remove any noise of tags already included in originating .mkv which are not specifically relevant to music audio/video tagging requirements)

It would be great to see MMH, mp3tag and foobar2000 fully aligned in method of tagging mka & mkv music files i.e.

Target Type 50 used for Album - TITLE, ARTIST, DATE, NUMBER (total number of tracks)
Target Type 30 used for Track - NUMBER, TITLE, ARTIST, GENRE

mp3tag and foobar2000 seem to have no idea how to read tagging currently being applied by MMH into an mkv
In contrast they are happy reading tags that have been written to mkv by each others app
(Interoperability looks good, including the addition of album art cover)

MMH appears to get confused reading tags included in an mkv by mp3tag and/or foobar2000

Could reason for Foobar2000 and mp3tag not seeing tags included within mkv via MMH be due to currently only using target type 30 and the inclusion of EDITION UID and Chapter UID as Target type headers?

Hope this mkv mka tagging feedback is useful ahead of Kodi supporting the read of mkv and mka tags in a future Kodi Piers release.

 

[HomerJAU]

I have performed an observational review of mkv tagged

Firstly, thank you for your detailed analysis. I will look at this closely tomorrow morning.

I was aware that MMH single track per file tagging was not correct. It’s in the top of my current hit list.

Could you kindly do same analysis on all three taggers with an album file (a single file with multiple tracks/chapters)?

The MMH code was based on an example Kodi working single file multi track (chaptered) Matroska file. MMH tagged files do get imported correctly when Kodi 22 scans them. I also am aware the type 30/50 alignment issue. But that’s what Kodi is currently using in my testing.

 

[gorman]

To use MPEG-H decoder one has to have Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 Redistributable installed.
As far as I can see it does not come with MMH nor is this pointed out anywhere.

Edit: should have mentioned this. The real problem is that no error is provided by MMH. The program simply tries and tries and tries again with no progress. I discovered Visual C++ redistributable was needed by trying to launch mpeghDecoder.exe from the command line.

 

[MikeKL]

Yes in my previous post I was performing observational analysis in single mkv file, single track mode.

I have commenced a test with a single multichapter file using MMH 9 Chapter editor to re-name each chapter to relevant track name.
I found and included album/track information via the "Get tags from Musicbrainz" option then reviewed/copied names required to chapters.
I then saved the multichapter mkv

I then re-read the file in MMH Tag & Rename to check how tags (Included within mkv) were being presented by MMH.
(With load mkv tags option enabled)

Generally OK, I noted that individual track numbers were not being included as a tag for each chapter.
(i.e. when I looked at result in MKV ToolNix info tool, where we see in following screen grab selection the overall Album tags along with 1st Chapters Track related tags)

I also had a quick look at result when single mkv file is read in Foobar2000 and mp3tag.

Foobar can see all the tracks and can step through and play each track as expected, but Foobar does not appear to know how to read tags included in the file by MMH.

mp3Tag does not appear to know how to read tags included in the file by MMH.

Hope this information is useful.

 

[HomerJAU]

Have you tried loading Mp3tag and Foobar tagged multi track/chaptered files into Kodi 22 alphas?

 

[gorman]

When using MMH Atmos Helper and encoding I get this error. It was not there in 8.0.12

I obfuscate the public key token as I'm not sure about privacy/security implications.

 

[HomerJAU]

When using MMH Atmos Helpe

Is that latest MMH 9 beta 7? (I thought I’d fixed that error a week or so ago?)

 

[gorman]

Is that latest MMH 9 beta 7? (I thought I’d fixed that error a week or so ago?)

Let me check... no, I am sorry, it's Beta 5. Sorry for wasting your time... :-/

 

[HomerJAU]

No probs.

 

[MikeKL]

Have you tried loading Mp3tag and Foobar tagged multi track/chaptered files into Kodi 22 alphas?

Yes I have tried recently with an album with each track as a seperated mkv removing album cue and nfo files from Album folder such that kodi should only look within each mkv files for tag information. I have just tried again with Kodi (22.0-ALPHA1 (21.90.700) Git:20250311-8adbf5c4a1). Platform: Windows NT x86 64-bit

And when I try to attempt to read Album into Music DB after ensuring? that kodi 22 recognises mkv as a valid music file by including following in advancedsetttings.xml

<advancedsettings version="1">
  <musicextensions>
     <add>.mkv|.mp4</add>
  </musicextensions>
</advancedsettings>

But currently Kodi just seems to completely ignore the folder/files with following pertinent information extracted from kodi.log ?

2025-03-12 17:13:34.883 T:18768    info <general>: Loaded settings file from special://profile/advancedsettings.xml
2025-03-12 17:13:34.883 T:18768    info <general>: Contents of special://profile/advancedsettings.xml are...
                                                   <advancedsettings version="1">
                                                     <musicextensions>
                                                       <add>.mkv|.mp4</add>
                                                     </musicextensions>
                                                   </advancedsettings>

2025-03-12 17:13:41.732 T:18768    info <general>: Loading skin file: MyMusicNav.xml, load type: KEEP_IN_MEMORY
2025-03-12 17:13:43.962 T:18768 warning <general>: XFILE::CFileFactory::CreateLoader - unsupported protocol(sources) in sources://music.tbn
2025-03-12 17:13:47.009 T:18768    info <general>: Loading skin file: DialogContextMenu.xml, load type: KEEP_IN_MEMORY
2025-03-12 17:13:48.164 T:10092 warning <general>: [WS-Discovery]: The initial search for servers has failed. No servers found.
2025-03-12 17:13:49.938 T:18768    info <general>: Loading skin file: DialogConfirm.xml, load type: KEEP_IN_MEMORY
2025-03-12 17:13:55.046 T:18768 warning <general>: XFILE::CFileFactory::CreateLoader - unsupported protocol(sources) in sources://music.tbn
2025-03-12 17:13:56.680 T:18768    info <general>: Loading skin file: DialogMediaSource.xml, load type: KEEP_IN_MEMORY
2025-03-12 17:13:58.764 T:18768    info <general>: Loading skin file: FileBrowser.xml, load type: KEEP_IN_MEMORY
2025-03-12 17:14:17.697 T:18768 warning <general>: XFILE::CFileFactory::CreateLoader - unsupported protocol(sources) in sources://music.tbn
2025-03-12 17:14:17.749 T:25536    info <general>: My Music: Scanning for music info using worker thread, operation took 0s
2025-03-12 17:14:17.761 T:18768 warning <general>: XFILE::CFileFactory::CreateLoader - unsupported protocol(sources) in sources://music.tbn
2025-03-12 17:14:34.873 T:18768    info <general>: Skipped 1 duplicate messages..

----edit---

And yes the files in question have been tagged using mp3tag, here is a screen grab

and read played back correctly in foobar2000

 

[HomerJAU]

It’s early days with Kodi’s Matroska tagging support. I’ll take a closer look and see, it possible that all four of the programs you’ve mentioned need some changes (Kodi 22 alpha, MMH 9 beta, MP3Tag and Foobar. Then there’s ffmpeg that’s used by both Kodi and MMH which has bugs!).

The Matroska tagging spec should be the starting point but that’s open to interpretation/inconsistent IMO). It will get sorted out soon! I think Kodi is the first media player app to use Matroska tags in any meaningful way (multi chaptered music tags)

 

[MikeKL]

No problem, I was coming from each Music Video mkv and/or Music Audio mka track from an Album, should ideally be a seperated file.
(Even if orginal source was a single large file, chaptered per track etc)

Current versions of foobar2000 and mp3tag support above breakdown methodology, reading file tags from the Matroska file without needing to read additional .cue .nfo .jpg files in album folder.

Will keep an eye on the upcoming developments in MMH and Kodi 22 and of course happy to test and provide feedback if its useful/helpful.

 

[cdheer]

Then there’s ffmpeg that’s used by both Kodi and MMH which has bugs!).

It's always ffmpeg, all the way down. (Unless anyone still uses mencoder, I suppose.)

 

[M-K]

Hi Garry, testing 9beta7.

1. Chapter Editor
- open MKV file, paste (I put in the names, remove leading and tailing numbers, Copy tracks)
- Save Cue (add information as needed) => because I don't have KODi 22.2 yet.
- Save
2. Extract Audio from MKV
- no chapters. 1. Chapter Editor removed those. But works in V8.

More to explore.

 

[HomerJAU]

testing 9beta7.

Thanks. I’ll look at it today.

 

[M-K]

Next:
Used Chapter Editor from V8 and continued with V9beta7:

2. Extract Audio from MKV
-First track in grid is wrong, see 01.jpg
-picture is not saved with the FLAC files, but titles are ok, see 02.jpg

 

[M-K]

Hi, me again.

Scrape a concert folder:
Scraping a 2nd time is still broken. Parameter not valid.

Probably I'll find some more bugs.

 

[HomerJAU]

The more you find, the more I fix, the less others will find