Software Update: Kodi 16.0 beta 2

The second beta of Kodi 16.0 has been released. Kodi is a cross platform media center software developed for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android and iOS. In addition to building a library of videos, the multimedia player also has the ability to build a music library if the music is properly tagged, such as ID3v1, v2.3 or v2.4, Vorbis Comments and Ape.

Caveates to music library:

• Your music needs to be properly tagged. For example with ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, Vorbis Comments or APE
• If not properly tagged Kodi can’t properly organize it and things might be completely misplaced.
• Properly tagging music files can be a tedious job however there are several tools for assisting on that: Music Brainz Picard, Mp3Tag, TagScanner and so on
• Scanning these files could take quite a while before it’s finished depending on the amount

Advantages to music library:

• You will get an awesome looking library view just like for movies and tvshows
• You can search your music files
• Library splits up the music in sections: Genres, Artists, Albums, Singles, All songs, Years, Top 100(based on your playback), Recently added/played albums, Compilations
• You can split everything up even further using smart playlists
• You can rate your music and filter based on that
• Since Kodi also acts as UPnP server you can share them over you home-network if the clients support this
• You can scan for additional information like artist biography or album review/synopsis (right click or C key in album or artist library)
• This can be enabled by default in settings -> music -> library -> “Fetch additional information during updates”
• You can change the default language for online information by going to settings -> addon-ons -> my add-ons -> Information providers -> Album or artist information -> open the universal album or artist scraper

Although music library is not yet at the same level as movies or tv shows, there is certainly work being done in this area to make it better. Stay tuned for next version.

Fixes done in this beta 2:

• Fixed: Library export now shows the correct dialogs
• Fixed: Don’t include broken add-ons in the update panel which is accessed through add-on information
• Fixed: Next recording widget for PVR
• Fixed: Timer dialog fixes for PVR
• Fixed: Ignore volume changes on corked sink for Pulse
• Fixed: Don’t show repeating timers on PVR recording list
• Fixed: Redact file name in log output for smb://