[Wanilton]

@pkscuot, here translate for Portuguese (Brazil), with fixes new version 1.3.3:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/25170804/Artist...trings.xml

Well I hope you finish - images for discography, great job,

Thanks,

Wanilton

[pkscout]

@pkscuot, here translate for Portuguese (Brazil), with fixes new version 1.3.3:

Great, thanks. I've added them to the github repo. I don't even want to know what the files said before.

[pkscout]

OK, the beta now includes an option to specify a folder name other than extrafanart. The folder still has to be in the same path as before though. Basically where it used to look only in:

artist/extrafanart

you can now specify a name so it will look instead in:

artist/stuff

This is a global change, so if you change to "stuff" then all your artist images need to be in artist/stuff.

@Wanilton, I think there will yet be other string changes, so no need to send me an updated file yet. I'll ping you for one when I'm ready to do the next release. In the meantime I just stuck the English strings in the Portuguese (Brazil) file.

[pkscout]

Artist Slideshow 1.3.5 beta

1.3.5 introduces slideshows for songs with multiple artists. It was a bit more of a pain than I had thought it would be, but it seems to be working now. Here's what it does:

1. AS parses the artist field and splits it up into multiple artists based on either "/", "feat.", or "ft."
   
2. AS then takes the first artist and runs through the normal routine of finding images and then displays them
   
3. AS then does the same thing for the next artist, except instead of displaying them it copies them to that other directory
   
4. the step above continues for all artists (i.e. AS can handle an arbitrary number of artists in the field)
   
5. once the last artist has been processed, AS switches to the folder with the merged images
   

A few notes.

• AS downloads the artist bio only for the first artist. I just didn't want to try and figure out how to merge all that text in any meaningful way, and I figure the first artist is the primary artist for the work anyway.
  
• If your second artist has a bunch of images to download, it may be awhile before you see any. It was hard enough to get the code to this point. Adding the progressive download to multiple artists would probably make my ears bleed.
  
• AS will also check the title field for "feat." or "ft." I did that mainly because that seems to be the standard iTunes and Amazon use, and I didn't want to redo all mine. AS can still do an arbitrary number of artists, but the title would have to be something like [b]SONG NAME feat. ARTIST 1, feat. ARTIST2[b].
  
• If you are streaming stuff where the artist is in the title field, this should work if you have multiple artists in the place where we parse the artist out, but AS won't check the remaining title for the "iTunes" way. I don't do any of the streaming, so I didn't want to touch the logic for parsing that with no way to test it.
  

So, let me know how this works.

[pkscout]

Well I hope you finish - images for discography, great job,

So this is what happens when you take over maintaining a plugin and haven't parsed through all the code. It does things you don't know about. After looking through the properties code and back at the documentation, I realized Artist Slideshow already exposes a URL for album thumbnails. It doesn't download the thumbs, but if you add the property to the skin, XBMC caches it after the download. Here's an example:

Code:

<control type="image" id="1003">
    <description>Artist Album Art</description>
    <posx>300</posx>
    <posy>31</posy>
    <width>100</width>
    <height>100</height>
    <texture>$INFO[Window(Visualisation).Property(ArtistSlideshow.1.AlbumThumb)]</texture>
    <visible>!IsEmpty(Window(Visualisation).Property(ArtistSlideshow.1.AlbumThumb))</visible>        
</control>

There is a property for each album, so Window(Visualisation).Property(ArtistSlideshow.1.AlbumThumb) gets the first album, Window(Visualisation).Property(ArtistSlideshow.2.AlbumThumb) gets you the second, etc. The actual thumbnail is 300 x 300 pixels. In the example above I scaled it down to 100 x 100 pixels.

So I think this request is done now. I've updated the Confluence skin files to include a four album discography. The link in the second post of this thread is still valid if you want to get the updated files.

@Wanilton, I think I'm done with any updates that will require changes to strings.xml, so when you get a chance could you update the translation you're doing? Once I have that and sit on the rest of this a few days during testing, I'll be ready to do another official release.

[Wanilton]

@pkscuot, thanks, your tip worked perfectly, since I start a song on the album, you have the album art of the artist (discography). I observed limit of 50 covers for discography, it´s limited by script or LastFM?

Is there any way to have these images only focusing on the artist himself, without having to run the music to receive such images albums, a kind of offline mode?

A second request, you can add to the script, the year of release of the each album?

Thanks,

[pkscout]

@pkscuot, thanks, your tip worked perfectly, since I start a song on the album, you have the album art of the artist (discography). I observed limit of 50 covers for discography, it´s limited by script or LastFM?

I believe that is a LastFM limit. You have an artist that has put out 50 albums?!?!? That's pretty impressive.

Is there any way to have these images only focusing on the artist himself, without having to run the music to receive such images albums, a kind of offline mode?

Nope. Artist Slideshow is meant to show artwork, not download it (it really just downloads them to a cache because XBMC's slideshow has to have local images to work). I think there's something called CDArt Manager that will do offline downloads of artist images.

A second request, you can add to the script, the year of release of the each album?

I looked. The short answer is "no." The long answer is that Last.FM doesn't include the album year is the feed that gives me the list of albums. I can technically get the album year if I cycle through every album and ask Last.FM for the year, but that is a pretty heavy handed use of the API (in your case 50 calls for just that one artist) to get back such a small piece of information. So it's not going to happen. Sorry.

[Wanilton]

@pkscuot, thanks for info, there are many artists with more 50 albums, it´s normal...about off-line mode, my goal not is download image, but show images, but your script only work for us, if running one song first, imagine this situation i have artists, if press button info artist or info album, don´t show discography image, only work (show images) if first run one song (playlist) work very well, maybe more clear now for you.
Understand your explanation about API about years, fine,

thanks again,

Wanilton

[pkscout]

A pull request has been submitted for v1.4. It should appear in the official repo in the next few days. There weren't any changes from the 1.3.5 beta to the final release.

v.1.4
- added ability to display artwork from multiple artists simultaneously
- added option for a folder name other than extrafanart
- added notification when downloading first image for an artist
- added option for user to set image to use during download of first artist image

[fredphoesh]

A pull request has been submitted for v1.4. It should appear in the official repo in the next few days. There weren't any changes from the 1.3.5 beta to the final release.

v.1.4
- added ability to display artwork from multiple artists simultaneously
- added option for a folder name other than extrafanart
- added notification when downloading first image for an artist
- added option for user to set image to use during download of first artist image

Great news, thanks for the ongoing work you do on this fantastic add-on... May it never "die" due to not being supported by some xbmc upgrade. This addon is what makes listening to XBMC worthwhile... and the reason I donated to xbmc in the first place!

Keep up the good work!
Mark

[fredphoesh]

@pkscuot Hi,
I have updated and for some reason there is no artist biography displayed in full screen mode. (using aeon nox skin)

I have set "extra artist info" in the Artist Slideshow settings
I have set the music scraper to universal

Is there anything else I might have forgotten?

@Wanilton, many artists have made more than 50 albums? hmmm Im curious... please could you name your top 10? Only bob dylan has about 50 in my library!

Tx
Mark.,

[bossanova808]

@pkscout Just a note, I haven't investigated yet but I've also had issues of late with no bio in XSqueeze - is the bio re-downloaded every time or is it stored somewhere, in which case may be some sort of caching issue?

[pkscout]

I have updated and for some reason there is no artist biography displayed in full screen mode. (using aeon nox skin)

I have set "extra artist info" in the Artist Slideshow settings
I have set the music scraper to universal

Hmmm. I didn't make any changes to the artist bio download with the last set of betas (assuming you two are both using the 1.3.x beta version). I just checked, and I'm getting bio information on mine.

@fredphoesh, the setting Download additional artist information should be the only setting you need to check to get the artist info. Artist Slideshow downloads the bio from Last.FM regardless of your scraper setting, so if there's no artist info in Last.FM that would be the issue. I'm not 100% sure what gets downloaded if you select a language other than English and that artist bio isn't available in the selected language, so that's worth checking too. I'll just state the obvious as a last thing. Your skin has to support displaying the artist bio info, and I'm pretty sure Aeon Nox does (although I don't use that skin).

@pkscout Just a note, I haven't investigated yet but I've also had issues of late with no bio in XSqueeze - is the bio re-downloaded every time or is it stored somewhere, in which case may be some sort of caching issue?

@bossanova, the artist bio is cached in the same directory as other cached images in a file called artistbio.nfo. If you delete that it should download a fresh one. It is also updated periodically automatically (i.e. that cached version ages out).

If you two keep having issues, a debug log would be nice so I can take a closer look.

[Tommy2012]

Thx PKscuot

Great add-on

[bossanova808]

Hey pkscout - sent you an email w. the logs.