QQ Media Player NUC Buyers Club - Discussion

[LuvMyQuad]

However, I have a few albums in either DTS (.wav) or Atmos (.m4a) and it does not work for these.

The only music formats i have in my entire library are FLAC, mkv/mka, and m4a.

 

[HomerJAU]

I mucked around with mp4 for concerts at one stage, but MKA/MKA have good editing tools (used in MMH) so editing is faster than MP4.

Now we can tag MKA its my recommended container for hires audio > 8 channels, I've converted all my SACDs to FLAC ages ago. But if you have DTS-HDMA on a BDA then it should be ripped to MKA, not converted to FLAC now, back then yes, but not now.

 

[PK]

You are drowning? You should see my office desk right now: Two large screens 3 x development NUCs, a maize of USB thumb drives, not mention several A4 (Letter) notebooks of all my code design for last few years!

People drown in bathtubs every year!

 

[barfle]

I’ve never used Kodi, don’t have any MKA or MKV files, but I have a pretty big digital music collection on my PC and will once again have one (identical, almost) on my NAS when I get it rebuilt.

I’ve done a hell of a lot of work tidying up my metadata, including artwork for playing through my Oppo 105 and my Roku ultra, and while it’s pretty good (my long-time standard), this may be a way to improve the user experience.

I expect a learning curve that’s going to be confusing for a while. I wasn’t born knowing this stuff (another of my pithy sayings).

 

[MrBurns]

Just to pick up on a couple of queries I've seen in this thread.

1) Kodi fully supports a composer tag as well as a composersort tag. It also supports Conductor and Arranger for classical music
If you are using something like mp3tag, just enter each composer into the composer tag and separate them with a ; (semicolon)
Same with the composersort tag, so something like this for Der Stein der Weisen, oder die Zauberinsel

COMPOSER Johann Baptist Henneberg;Benedikt Schack;Franz Xaver Gerl;Emanuel Schikaneder;Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
COMPOSERSORT Henneberg, Johann Baptist;Schack, Benedict;Gerl, Xaver Franz;Schikander, Emanuel;Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

Bold bit is the name of the tag, next bit is the values.

Depending on a setting, when navigating by artist names, or composers, lyricists etc kodi can either sort on the first name or last name (if composersort was set in the tags) - most tagging software does it automatically. Picard definitely does.
For instance, with the setting disabled, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would appear in the "W" section. With it enabled however, he would be in with the "M" section.

DISCART
naming this depends how you have structured your files. If you have
Artist
|---Album
|-----Disc 1
| |---- tracks
|----Disc 2
| |---- tracks
Etc, then each disc should be named discart.png and be in the disc directory that it belongs to.

If however you have all the tracks for a multi-disc album in one directory, possibly named 1-01-song1 1-02-song2 etc where the first number is the disc number, then you should put all the discart in the same directory as the songs and name it discart1.png, discart2.png etc. Kodi will find it and apply it to the right set of tracks,

On the subject of multi-disc sets, you don't need to actually name them to get Kodi to recognize a boxset. Although they usually are named, if there are 3 or more discs to an album and the album is not a compilation then Kodi will auto convert it into a boxset and create "fake" names of "disc 1", "disc 2" etc when adding it to it's library.

Its actually really powerful once you get to grips with it, but I've been using it since 2012 and I occasionally still find stuff I didn't know. And that's without living on the bleeding edge...!

 

[HomerJAU]

We have a new Kodi expert fellow Nucheads!

Thanks Gary!

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Just to pick up on a couple of queries I've seen in this thread.

Welcome to the forum and the NUC club @MrBurns

 

[humprof]

We have a new Kodi expert fellow Nucheads!

Thanks Gary!

Waitaminnit: is @MrBurns Homer's boss? Where's @MrSmithers in all this...and what about Marge?

 

[MrBurns]

Thank you @HomerJAU and @LuvMyQuad

Someone else asked about iso's and sacd etc.

Kodi can play iso's with no problem straight out-of-the-box so to speak. You can also have rudimentary art support (album cover) by dropping a jpg next to the iso and naming it folder.jpg If there is CD-text describing the artist and track name, you will get those too.

For SACD support there is an addon which should be listed under Audio Decoders. I think there are 2 currently, but one might be deprecated. As I run on Linux, I have to build my own addons if I want them. The one I have is non-configurable and lists stereo tracks, followed by any multi-channel tracks. The other one has a setting to display all tracks, just stereo, or just multi-channel.

If you want to play multi-channel SACD's you'll need a beefy CPU to do the decoding!

 

[humprof]

Just to pick up on a couple of queries I've seen in this thread.

1) Kodi fully supports a composer tag as well as a composersort tag. It also supports Conductor and Arranger for classical music
If you are using something like mp3tag, just enter each composer into the composer tag and separate them with a ; (semicolon)
Same with the composersort tag, so something like this for Der Stein der Weisen, oder die Zauberinsel

COMPOSER Johann Baptist Henneberg;Benedikt Schack;Franz Xaver Gerl;Emanuel Schikaneder;Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
COMPOSERSORT Henneberg, Johann Baptist;Schack, Benedict;Gerl, Xaver Franz;Schikander, Emanuel;Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

Bold bit is the name of the tag, next bit is the values.

Depending on a setting, when navigating by artist names, or composers, lyricists etc kodi can either sort on the first name or last name (if composersort was set in the tags) - most tagging software does it automatically. Picard definitely does.
For instance, with the setting disabled, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would appear in the "W" section. With it enabled however, he would be in with the "M" section.

DISCART
naming this depends how you have structured your files. If you have
Artist
|---Album
|-----Disc 1
| |---- tracks
|----Disc 2
| |---- tracks
Etc, then each disc should be named discart.png and be in the disc directory that it belongs to.

If however you have all the tracks for a multi-disc album in one directory, possibly named 1-01-song1 1-02-song2 etc where the first number is the disc number, then you should put all the discart in the same directory as the songs and name it discart1.png, discart2.png etc. Kodi will find it and apply it to the right set of tracks,

On the subject of multi-disc sets, you don't need to actually name them to get Kodi to recognize a boxset. Although they usually are named, if there are 3 or more discs to an album and the album is not a compilation then Kodi will auto convert it into a boxset and create "fake" names of "disc 1", "disc 2" etc when adding it to it's library.

Its actually really powerful once you get to grips with it, but I've been using it since 2012 and I occasionally still find stuff I didn't know. And that's without living on the bleeding edge...!

Thanks for all this, @MrBurns, especially the classical stuff. Great to benefit from your experience & expertise. We're lucky to have yet another addition to the Kodi-NUC A-Team (to mix TV metaphors).

I'm still playing with how to handle classical composers (or, for that matter, all artist names): for a number of reasons, I'd almost made up my mind to just alphabetize by first name alone--only if MusicBrainz adds COMPOSERSORT by default, then...back to the mulling board. I know there's no single "right" way.

 

[roundhousequad]

If you want to play multi-channel SACD's you'll need a beefy CPU to do the decoding!

There is a cpu based SACD decoder?

 

[MrBurns]

There is a cpu based SACD decoder?

Yes, there are two although as I suspected, one is deprecated. Github links are https://github.com/xbmc/vfs.sacd for the deprecated version and https://github.com/xbmc/audiodecoder.sacd

I'm still playing with how to handle classical composers (or, for that matter, all artist names): for a number of reasons, I'd almost made up my mind to just alphabetize by first name alone--only if MusicBrainz adds COMPOSERSORT by default, then...back to the mulling board. I know there's no single "right" way.

Whatever floats your boat really. However, I'd strongly suggest tagging everything as fully as possible. When navigating into role based nodes such as composers, arrangers, conductors etc you can pick from all roles that you have added. I have downsized these screenshots so as to not take up too much bandwidth, (this is just a little subset of my library that I scanned in to show some examples)

So from the all roles tab we scroll down and choose Electric guitar.

Clicking on this gives a list of guitarists.

Lets choose Dave Rotheray, guitarist for the Beautiful South and see what we get.

That shows me the album, and clicking on that to open it shows me the track that Dave played on.

If you have a full set of tags, you can pull up the information for that track and see who else performed on it, mixed it, produced it etc etc

OFC, you don't have to tag to this level, but if you want to, then Kodi is more than capable of drilling down through that to find exactly what you want.

 

[humprof]

Yes, there are two although as I suspected, one is deprecated. Github links are https://github.com/xbmc/vfs.sacd for the deprecated version and https://github.com/xbmc/audiodecoder.sacd



Whatever floats your boat really. However, I'd strongly suggest tagging everything as fully as possible. When navigating into role based nodes such as composers, arrangers, conductors etc you can pick from all roles that you have added. I have downsized these screenshots so as to not take up too much bandwidth, (this is just a little subset of my library that I scanned in to show some examples)

So from the all roles tab we scroll down and choose Electric guitar.
View attachment 114056

View attachment 114057

Clicking on this gives a list of guitarists.

View attachment 114058

Lets choose Dave Rotheray, guitarist for the Beautiful South and see what we get.

View attachment 114059

That shows me the album, and clicking on that to open it shows me the track that Dave played on.

View attachment 114060

If you have a full set of tags, you can pull up the information for that track and see who else performed on it, mixed it, produced it etc etc

View attachment 114062


OFC, you don't have to tag to this level, but if you want to, then Kodi is more than capable of drilling down through that to find exactly what you want.

Dang! That really appeals to my inner anal-retentive. (Well, maybe that's a redundancy. Also: nothing all that secret, paradoxically, about that particular personality trait.) Anyway: I'd love to be able to sort on things like engineer, producer, mixer, sideman, etc., etc. Too cool!

I can imagine this turning into a project that takes up the rest of my mortal days, though, even if MusicBrainz automatically populates a lot of those fields. (Where a MusicBrainz entry exists, anyway. I've been running into a number of classical albums already that aren't in the database.) But I'll continue to stay small and go slow, as everyone has been recommending.