Album artists of compilation albums are not shown if "Music genre to artists" setting is enabled

Issue description:
When the option “Music genre to artists” is disabled, the genre tab lists all genres, and under each genre a list of all albums of this genre. This includes compilation albums, which appear under the “album artist” (if the list is sorted by artist) or under the localized “Various artists” string which is seemingly set by Kodi. Even if no album artist is set at all (e.g. albums which have no individual track artists set), these albums are listed at the top of the list.

When the option “Music genre to artists” is enabled, the list of all album artists included in this genre is listed under each genre. But that does not apply to album artists of compilation albums - neither if set explicitly, nor if set by Kodi as “Various artists”. Those are not shown, and these albums cannot easily be navigated to through the genre tab.

The only possible workaround is to have the “album artist only” filter option disabled, then find and click on one of the track artists from the compilation album, switch to single listing instead of album listing (because there is no album for this artist, only individual tracks), and then you can see one of the tracks from the compilation. You can then long press the track and choose menu → “go to album” to reach the album - very inconvenient.

If this was fixed and the album artist of a compilation would be listed, it would still be the question how compilation albums that have no album artist can be found under each genre. From my point of view, there should be a default “compilation” artist which collects either

  • all albums which have the compilation flag set, or
  • all albums which have the compilation flag set but no album artist.

This might beome even more necessary for albums which have no artists at all (neither “album artist” nor any artist in the individual tracks). It seems that Kodi sets a localized default compilation album artist, if an album has multiple track artists (in my case “Verschiedene Interpreten” which is German for “Various artists”). But Kodi does not set such an album artist, if the individual tracks do not have any artist set. So there is no way to navigate to these albums by artist.

Logs:
Logs and Music DB are being sent separately via email with subject:
[Support] Yatse logs - 20201011_114502

Screenshots:

Additional information:
In my specific case, examples for above behaviour are the “Space Night” albums. Those have album artist “Space Night” set, so they show up under Genres → Electronica → scroll to “S” in the album list if sorted by artist. Once “Music genre to artists” is enabled, no album artist “Space Night” is listed and the albums cannot easily be reached.
An example for an album without any artist would be the album “Two Candles” (genre “Kompiliertes” → this is a self-made mixtape with custom track titles, hence no artists).

For the space night example, the artist have no genre associated so it’s normal it’s not shown for the electronica genre. Don’t know what you expect here.

Can you be more specific - maybe we can talk in Kodi DB terms so that we mean the same things? If I understand it correctly, genres are assigned to songs, not to artists (in the table song_genre). Artists do not have genres assigned to them directly, you would have to look that up through a JOIN, and then it is quite possible that a single artist has multiple genres.

So my issue might be a parsing problem - either on Kodi or on Yatse side. Any individual song of the Space Night albums will have (amongst others) the following ID3 tags:

  • Artist: (whatever the track artist is)
  • Album artist: “Space Night”
  • Genre: Electronica

This is being parsed by Kodi, and then the artist “Space Night” appears in the DB in the artist table (id 143), and is linked to several albums in the album_artist table. Of course it is also set as a string in several tables (e.g. strArtistDisp in album table).

I don’t know how Yatse (or Kodi) directly relates artists to genres (there is no table or view for that in the Music DB), but maybe this is only done for track artists, not album artists?

Kodi have multiple genre for artists, the scraped genres and the song genres.

If you want Yatse to be able to use song genres you need to use Kodi 19 alpha 2.

I do no online scraping for the music, I only have Kodi parse the ID3 tags - which works well and for the most part also works well in Yatse. The album artist is even shown as long as "Music genre to artists” is not enabled, so the data is available in general.

But is this an issue in Kodi then that the album artist is not linked to the genre? I do not fully get it, because all the information is there - at what point does Kodi not deliver the genre information properly? In the Kodi UI, I can properly navigate to Music → Genre → Electronica → Space Night and have the albums listed. But maybe the API behaves differently?

Yes it’s tied to Kodi and it’s API, update to Kodi 19 alpha 2 and it will works more like you want.

Well, I guess I will have to wait then for the alpha to become stable, as installing the alpha seems to risky for me to only solve this problem.

You can use Kodi in portable mode to test else you’ll have to wait a lot :slight_smile:

My Kodi runs on an RPi 4 with locally attached external hdd for the media, so I would have to switch SD cards, copy over the library and so on…

Well then closing both issue, feel free to reopen then when you switch to Kodi 19.

Well, I had to see if I could do a simple tryout. Installed Kodi 19 alpha 2 on WIndows and simply copied the library files from my RPi Kodi 18 over, without giving Kodi 19 any access to the media files.

What can I say, it works, also I could connect Yatse to the Kodi19 instance, and album artists are shown properly as expected. As promised. Thank you. I will consider now moving to Kodi 19 for my RPi as well, although I think there are still too much issues with Libreelec there.