While Kodi will upgrade older music libraries when a new version is installed, it does not rescan the music files. Hence it will not take notice of music file tags that have already been in the files but not processed by earlier versions of Kodi. Library update first checks that the files have changed (timesamp or size) before trying to rescan.
This leaves two ways to get Kodi to notice those tags
a) “touch” all your music files in some way so Kodi does rescan then on “update library”.
b) Drop the music source and add in again.
Approach b) is simple, but it wipes all your playcount data, and any additional artist or album info and artwork scraped from online sources. You can rescrape of course, but that takes time and hits the servers with extra traffic.
Then there is using import/export to/from xml as a single file. This can be used to avoid rescraping, but not so sure what it does with playcounts.
So anyone got any strategies they would like to share for keeping the playcounts?
It may seem strange for me of all people to be asking this, but I don’t update my family seutp very often and in testing, where I wipe library often, the persistence of playcount doesn’t matter to me much. Also because of testing I have often “touched” my music files in some way.
But with v17 release getting closer, and the lots of new tag processing it has, I am looking for a way to make accessing those new features as pianless for users as possible.