Same album in different libraries

This is not so much a technical support case, more of a question to better understand how Kodi libraries work (which is only remotely your topic, but I guess you know a lot about that) and how Symfonium processes and displays them.

I have now the case that I have the same album in two Kodi libraries (two folders on the same Kodi server, but added as seprate libraries to Kodi). The album files are not copies of the same files, but were ripped at different times into different formats and also have slight differences in the tags, but artist, album and track titles are all the same.

The reason for this is that different family members have different libraries, but sometimes the libraries include the same albums because we might like the same stuff. Still we do not want to see all the other stuff of the others all the time.

In Kodi I cannot “univew” certain libraries. So when I look e.g. at the web interface under the artist, I see every album once, but the tracks have doubled. As one copy of the album has the disc number tag set to “1” and the other does not have a disc number tag, the 11 tracks are listed in proper order from 1 to 11 and then again from 1 to 11.

If I look at Symfonium now with both libraries active, it is the same: every album is there once under the artist, and the tracks appear once under “Disc 0” header and then again under “Disc 1” header. This is consistent with the tags.

If I disable one of the libraries now in the filter, the following happens, depending on which library I disable:

  • Disable library 1: The album is viewed exactly as before, with double tracklist.
  • Disable library 2: The album is not shown at all anymore.
    This is unexpected, because I thought that when disabling library 1, (only) the tracks from library 2 will still be shown (and vice versa). But instead it seems that the overall album entry now belongs to only one of the libraries. Also I do not know how it is decided which library is chosen as an owner - in my case the library that had the tracks added later won.

I guess this is Kodi behaviour which cannot be done much about on Symfonium side. Do you know any smart solutions how to resolve this? Two come to my mind:

  • Slightly change the album title (not very elegant)
  • Add a “shared” library that includes albums used by more than one user (will pose a maintenance problem)

On a side note, and I noted that before, a similar behaviour is shown with genres. Eg. if the album (and by that the artist) in question is tagged with genreX in library1 and with genreY in library2, both genres will show up in the genre list in Symfonium even if library1 is disabled in the filter and library2 has no albums of genreX.

Any explanations, hints and tricks are welcome. Thanks!

PS: Of course I can provide logs if you want to see something specific.

I’ve started my crystal ball and it says it does not know :stuck_out_tongue:

I always needs logs and details like kodi version, your tags can be anything.

Best would be your exact Kodi version and your kodi musicXX.db, but if Kodi have duplicates on it’s side then it should be fixed there first.

I can of course provide logs (of what - a sync?). I can also give you the musicXX.db.

But I think my question lies essentially in this:

I just tried to find out when Kodi treats two albums separately. According to this forum post by Dave, it is either artist+albumtitle or MusicBrainz ID (confirmed also here for files from different source folders).

So I guess I have to clean that up on Kodi side. The concept of different source folders and treating them as separate sources as you implement it in Symfonium might not be exactly the same understanding in Kodi (where all sources are thrown together and treated as one big library).

Symfonium display the data Kodi sends including what library it’s part of :slight_smile: That depends depends also on your Kodi version.

From your description I guess that Kodi only return 1 album associated with 1 source from the API.

I think so, too. I sent you a PM with the music DB and further details.

As expected
Kodi returns only 1 album and only 1 source
"sourceid":[6] that is (C… Musik)

Now the funny thing: I removed the duplicate files from that source, cleaned and scanned the Kodi library and synced it again with Symfonium. Now the tracks are shown once only in every album, but the albums in question are still attached to the source I removed them from and do not show up in the other source where they actually come from.

I will send you the updated lib again.

It will be on Kodi side not much I can do here.

Yes, only that you can confirm. I will open an issue with them then.

They can read the DB and confirm too :wink:

Oh please, this one thing only :heart_eyes:

Actually, I can read the DB myself. SourceID is still 6.

:wink: You are now a Kodi expert :slight_smile:

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Can I have that as a badge in my user profile here? :wink:

I opened a case with the Kodi guys, let’s see what Dave says.

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