QQ Media Player NUC Buyers Club - Discussion

[HomerJAU]

Then, with a skin that supports it (Estuary does not) it will show some sort of icon or button next to any song...

Do you know which skins supports this Gary?

 

[MrBurns]

Do you know which skins supports this Gary?

Aeon Tajo does. I have a modded version of Estuary that does too. But this is Tajo in action. The little music notes to the left of the track denote that there is a video available. Moving left and clicking/selecting the note plays the youtube video, just selecting the text plays your library track.

 

[HomerJAU]

Nice, I’ll take a look at how that was implemented when this NUC project is off my plate.

 

[MrBurns]

Well when the boxset stuff got added into Kodi I found I could create a much better experience for my music, with different images for the discs and different covers as well. It was almost as good as the stuff on the shelf, it just didn't take up physical space as such.

What was missing though, as @humprof quite rightly points out, was the booklet that generally comes with a boxset. Until it was mentioned, I'd forgotten that I'd visited this area in the past. Kodi moves on quite quickly sometimes and one can easily get lost in a pile of information. But I digress.

I wanted to be able to do my shelf experience in Kodi so I scanned in some booklets to jpg and saved each image as booklet1, booklet2 etc. Because of the work of a couple of Kodi dev's, art in Kodi can be free-form. What that means for us as users is that if we have files named booklet1.jpg, booklet2.jpg etc etc in the same directory as an albums music files, then Kodi will add those files into its database when it scans the album.

Those files are then available to a skin (Kodi's GUI) when browsing that album via some skin properties. What all this means is that I was able to create a rudimentary window that displays those jpg files that I scanned. The "booklet" button only appears if an album actually has some booklet associated art.
For Queen - On Air, it looks like this.

Next Page

Further through

The window is quite large so that I can actually read the stuff! It's rudimentary though, two buttons to scroll left and right and 'esc' or 'back' to close it. It does show again the power of Kodi. You just need the idea and someone to implement it. Here this is done without any addon at all, I just baked it into my customised skin.

I did that back in 2019, but those screenshots are running that skin on a v22 alpha version built a couple of days back

 

[humprof]

There is a PDF reader plugin yes, but it only works with PDF files composed entirely of images.

Also, one should always err on the side of caution. I checked out the download link on the page you linked to, and it actually would download and install an adult only repository in Kodi. The two "alternative" download links are 404 errors.

Yikes! (Glad I didn't click on it.) Thanks for the follow-up on your alternative "home-made" PDF reader. I'll probably just wait until someone cleverer than me devises a plug-in that will read PDF booklets as-is.

You can also scan, re-scan, or re-scrape a subset of your music.

Thanks, too, for your explanation of "scanning" vs. "scraping." Now...as long as you've opened the door to the topic of "re-scanning," I'll walk on through that door, carrying a set of questions that I've been sitting on for a couple of days.

I can't not begin with a long-winded setup, so indulge me and/or skip ahead as necessary.

Say you painstakingly determined what tagging conventions you want to use and spent hours implementing them before setting up your Kodi library for the first time. And then, after living with your library for a while, you decide you'd actually like to implement some refinements or improvements to your whole tagging scheme.

Or take a less drastic case: Say you want to change one or more of just one given album's tags. Maybe you’ve changed your mind about the genres you want to assign to a particular album or track, or you discover that you (or MusicBrainz) were mistaken about the composer of a certain song, or you realize that a certain sideman actually plays on some tracks of this album but not others, or you stumble on better album art. (Or maybe somebody has clued you in to a tag like "DiscSubTitle" that you'd like to add to this album and/or others!)

From a discussion I had with another experienced QQ Kodi user a week or so ago, I get that there's a difference between looking for changed locations/pathnames and looking for changed tags/metadata. I.e., if you add files and folders, or rename or remove a file or folder, or even if you make bigger changes to your overall file structure or move your library to a different drive, you can scan (or rescan) the entire Library, and that will pick up all newly added content, including old content with new pathnames. (And then, if you want to try to remove the “ghost” content from your Library, you can do a “Clean library”--even if that operation is, I gather, not 100% reliable.) I don't necessarily understand the exact steps to follow for a rescan, but I'm sure I can find it in the Kodi documentation.

But my understanding is that the above process won’t register changes to metadata of previously extant files that haven't been moved. (Am I right about that?)

I've been studying the Kodi Wiki, specifically the "Updating or removing videos" > "Refresh Library" options, including "Individual Refresh." (And yeah, I know that both of those topics pertain to your video library, not your music library; I just found the instructions there a little clearer, conceptually speaking, than the analogous "Refresh Album" section of "Update Music Library.")

It seems as though selecting a media file and viewing its "Information" menu will show a "Refresh All" option that does actually refresh the item's metadata. What I'm wondering is: why isn’t there a bulk way to find and refresh any and all items in your library with changed metadata? What’s preventing Kodi from rescanning your library to look for (and update) not just new and/or absent content, but also changed tags?

 

[MrBurns]

Say you painstakingly determined what tagging conventions you want to use and spent hours implementing them before setting up your Kodi library for the first time. And then, after living with your library for a while, you decide you'd actually like to implement some refinements or improvements to your whole tagging scheme.

You can re-scan your whole library and if you answer "NO" to the question "Do full tag scan even when music files are unchanged?" Kodi should just pick up the changes that you have made.

Or take a less drastic case: Say you want to change one or more of just one given album's tags. Maybe you’ve changed your mind about the genres you want to assign to a particular album or track, or you discover that you (or MusicBrainz) were mistaken about the composer of a certain song, or you realize that a certain sideman actually plays on some tracks of this album but not others, or you stumble on better album art. (Or maybe somebody has clued you in to a tag like "DiscSubTitle" that you'd like to add to this album and/or others!)

Same thing. You can navigate to just that album and re-scan it and the tags should be updated. Art can be changed independently of the tags unless it is embedded art (embedded in the music files) so you can change that at any time.

From a discussion I had with another experienced QQ Kodi user a week or so ago, I get that there's a difference between looking for changed locations/pathnames and looking for changed tags/metadata. I.e., if you add files and folders, or rename or remove a file or folder, or even if you make bigger changes to your overall file structure or move your library to a different drive, you can scan (or rescan) the entire Library, and that will pick up all newly added content, including old content with new pathnames. (And then, if you want to try to remove the “ghost” content from your Library, you can do a “Clean library”--even if that operation is, I gather, not 100% reliable.) I don't necessarily understand the exact steps to follow for a rescan, but I'm sure I can find it in the Kodi documentation.

OK. The music library is built entirely differently from the video library. The video library depends upon file paths to build successfully, whereas the music library depends upon tags. You could put each track of an album in a different directory and as long as the tags are right, Kodi will show it and play it as a single album. To remove something, because paths aren't that important, you need to delete, or otherwise move the album or source out of the root path of your music library. A clean library will then detect that the album is missing and remove it from the library.

You can also remove an entire source in the same way, but if you remove the root source of your music library (assuming you just have the one) that will remove everything from your library.

It seems as though selecting a media file and viewing its "Information" menu will show a "Refresh All" option that does actually refresh the item's metadata. What I'm wondering is: why isn’t there a bulk way to find and refresh any and all items in your library with changed metadata? What’s preventing Kodi from rescanning your library to look for (and update) not just new and/or absent content, but also changed tags?

With the music library, if you select to scan a root directory, an artist or an individual album, Kodi will ask if you want to scan all the files (even if they are unchanged) or just the changed files.

So if your music structure is similar to this

Root source (eg C:/users/me/Music or smb://server/Music or nfs://192.168.1.5/music)
|
|-------Artist 1
| |-----Album 1
| | |-------Files
| |-----Album 2
| | |-------Files
|------Artist 2
| |-----Album 1
| | |-------Files


etc etc.
Then, if you re-scan the root source, Kodi will either scan ALL the music files (if you choose YES to "Do full tag scan?") or just the changed files if you choose no. You can also re-scan Artist 1 or Artist 2 etc or Album 1 of Artist 1 etc. So if you change the tags for Album 1, Artist 2 you can either navigate to that album and just re-scan that, or you could re-scan the whole root source, telling Kodi to just pick up the changed tags in either case. Obviously the first option is faster than the second as Kodi would have to skip all the unmodified files to get to the changed tags.

The "refresh" option that you are referring to is for scraping information. For a music album or artist, this will go back out onto the internet and fetch the most current data for the item (artist or album). This includes reviews, biographies, images, logos etc etc. There is also a way to do that for a subset of artists or albums.

Try not to confuse how the music library works with how the video library does. There is some cross-over between the music-video part which is part of the video library, but can fetch artist and album bio's, reviews and art etc from the music library. In the main though, they are entirely separate and function in totally different ways.

Internally, Kodi creates a hash for each directory that it scans. When it re-scans, it calculates a new hash for each directory and compares it to the stored value for that directory. If they are different, (some file in the directory has changed) then the directory is re-scanned. If they are the same, then the directory is skipped (unless you have told Kodi to scan all files even if the tags are unchanged) in which case, its scanned again anyway. That will pick up any changed tags as the file hash will be different.

However, you have to trigger the re-scan manually after you have changed/updated tags. Otherwise the current data in the database will be used and you won't see the changes.

So, edit what you want, re-scan your stuff (at whatever level you want) and see the changes in the GUI. Lots of people get caught out because they think that changes to the tags will automatically update the database, but that's not the case. Kodi can be set to update automatically when it's started or there are addons that watch directories (including the root source) and trigger updates if something changes. Personally though, I just update stuff (re-scan it) when I've changed something. Otherwise some of my data goes back over 10 years!!

 

[MrBurns]

Just to add a little more, these are a couple of screenshots from "The best classics ever!!". Yeah I know, but it gives at least an idea of what is possible, even though only a few tags (composer, orchestra and conductor) are set for each track. My wife and I signed the register in church to Pachelbel's Canon in D so it has a special place in my heart.

Showing the list of orchestra's

Clicking on any of those will show the albums, discs and then tracks that they played on. Discs can be turned off if you wish so that you just get albums, followed by tracks. There is also a way to get Kodi to navigate from artists directly to songs, missing out albums and discs entirely, so that it works much like Spotify or other streaming services (so I am told).

I don't think that works with roles (composer, orchestra etc) but it could probably be made to in the future.

 

[humprof]

You can re-scan your whole library and if you answer "NO" to the question "Do full tag scan even when music files are unchanged?" Kodi should just pick up the changes that you have made.

Same thing. You can navigate to just that album and re-scan it and the tags should be updated. Art can be changed independently of the tags unless it is embedded art (embedded in the music files) so you can change that at any time.


OK. The music library is built entirely differently from the video library. The video library depends upon file paths to build successfully, whereas the music library depends upon tags. You could put each track of an album in a different directory and as long as the tags are right, Kodi will show it and play it as a single album. To remove something, because paths aren't that important, you need to delete, or otherwise move the album or source out of the root path of your music library. A clean library will then detect that the album is missing and remove it from the library.

You can also remove an entire source in the same way, but if you remove the root source of your music library (assuming you just have the one) that will remove everything from your library.

With the music library, if you select to scan a root directory, an artist or an individual album, Kodi will ask if you want to scan all the files (even if they are unchanged) or just the changed files.

So if your music structure is similar to this

Root source (eg C:/users/me/Music or smb://server/Music or nfs://192.168.1.5/music)
|
|-------Artist 1
| |-----Album 1
| | |-------Files
| |-----Album 2
| | |-------Files
|------Artist 2
| |-----Album 1
| | |-------Files


etc etc.
Then, if you re-scan the root source, Kodi will either scan ALL the music files (if you choose YES to "Do full tag scan?") or just the changed files if you choose no. You can also re-scan Artist 1 or Artist 2 etc or Album 1 of Artist 1 etc. So if you change the tags for Album 1, Artist 2 you can either navigate to that album and just re-scan that, or you could re-scan the whole root source, telling Kodi to just pick up the changed tags in either case. Obviously the first option is faster than the second as Kodi would have to skip all the unmodified files to get to the changed tags.

The "refresh" option that you are referring to is for scraping information. For a music album or artist, this will go back out onto the internet and fetch the most current data for the item (artist or album). This includes reviews, biographies, images, logos etc etc. There is also a way to do that for a subset of artists or albums.

Try not to confuse how the music library works with how the video library does. There is some cross-over between the music-video part which is part of the video library, but can fetch artist and album bio's, reviews and art etc from the music library. In the main though, they are entirely separate and function in totally different ways.

Internally, Kodi creates a hash for each directory that it scans. When it re-scans, it calculates a new hash for each directory and compares it to the stored value for that directory. If they are different, (some file in the directory has changed) then the directory is re-scanned. If they are the same, then the directory is skipped (unless you have told Kodi to scan all files even if the tags are unchanged) in which case, its scanned again anyway. That will pick up any changed tags as the file hash will be different.

However, you have to trigger the re-scan manually after you have changed/updated tags. Otherwise the current data in the database will be used and you won't see the changes.

So, edit what you want, re-scan your stuff (at whatever level you want) and see the changes in the GUI. Lots of people get caught out because they think that changes to the tags will automatically update the database, but that's not the case. Kodi can be set to update automatically when it's started or there are addons that watch directories (including the root source) and trigger updates if something changes. Personally though, I just update stuff (re-scan it) when I've changed something. Otherwise some of my data goes back over 10 years!!

Thanks for that clear and detailed explanation! I'm gonna copy & keep it for future reference and study. (And I will just lock "video library" in a mental box to be opened at some unspecified date in the future....)