[steveearle86]

Hi,
I am having trouble when adding new music to Kodi. When I add an album (Paloma Faith - A Perfect Contradiction) to my music folder it scrapes and returns all the album information but no album art. When I go to "get thumb" I just get "no thumb". When I manually refresh, I get the same. I use universal album and artist scrapers as default.

When I change the scaper (album and artist) to Audio, it doesn't find anything, just stays on the search page


I have posted my error log here

Hope someone can help,
Thanks

[DaveBlake]

There are scraping issues at the moment related to servers (not Kodi or the Universal Scraper itself). I am hoping that someone here will give some feedback on that here, as I'm not sure I am clear on the details.

[steveearle86]

Hi,
thanks for your response.
That would make sense - I have been having trouble again today with both scrapers, I have re-installed Kodi and used a new, local database rather than the MySQL server and am still having issues. I have also tried updating the information through another device and am getting the same problem. I am finding it very frustrating

[DaveBlake]

Yes the problems with art are frustrating, but AFAIK the matter is beyond anyone here's control. It is nothing to do with Kodi version, local DB or MySQL. The artist and album universal scrapers use the Musicbrainz web site for fundamental idenification, or at least if access to MB fails then no further scraping can happen. The Musicbrainz server is overwhelmed, and there is some issue for the past month with schemas and mirrors which means that other servers mirroring the MB data don't work either.

If you have mbid tags in your music files then Musicbrainz server scraping failure gives error 503, without it is error 403. The odd item might get scraped ok, then others time out. The Musicbrainz server issue is also making Picard difficult to use.

But looking at your log you are getting Skin helper Service errors, so you could have some other issue too. That is a skinning addon that I know nothing about. You might get better help on skinning or addon forums. What skin are you using? Either way it could still be related to the underlying issue with the Musicbrainz server.

Also might be worth checking that the Universal Scraper addon installed is at the latest version

[steveearle86]

Hi,
Thanks for your reply. I have done some more testing with a clean Kodi install before installing any other add ons or skins.

I added a new album which wasn't automatically scraped, I manually "refreshed" and this was using the default, Universal Album / Artist Scraper, first time it returned nothing, second time it worked. I have put my log here.

Like you say, it seems to be an issue with the server as I am getting the HTTP 503 error and continous retrying seems to solve it.

Reasonably irritating but it seems like I have a workaround of "keep trying" hopefully MB sort their servers.

Incidentally, the log seems to show that it is querying the AudioDB even though I am not using their scraper?

[DaveBlake]

Yes, 503 errors are the Musicbrainz server being overwhelmed and not responding. For a while changing scraper settings to use a mirror improved things, but I don't think that works now because there have been schema changes that MB have not progagated to the virtual images. It is all up to them to fix this.

See http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=133547&page=25 and http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=132623&page=37

It could help matters for Kodi to change the way it manages scraped data between versions, improve import/export and NFO use and generally reduce the amount of server traffic that it generates. However that is further down the line, and fundamentally we still need Musicbrainz to serve up the data in the first place, the Universal Scraper(s) rely on this.

Meanwhile repeated attampts should eventually fetch the additional data. Beware that there is a bug in v16 (and before) so that "Query info for all..." only works when you have either just powered up or done a library update (check, there does not need to be any changes). Just repeatedly clicking on "Query info for all..." does not do anything after the first attempt.

Use of The AudioDB for some of the infomation is a Universal Scraper setting, it optionally checks a number of sources depending on how it is configured.