[Brian B]

I just did an initial scan of my music and XBMC came up with ~ 8000 artists. When I check the library images under the Artist category half to more of the artists do not have pictures or incorrect pictures. These are on some big name artists like James Brown. Some do not have images (which I understand), but others I can click on "artist info" from the context menu and "get thumbs" and there are artist images.

So, my question is...Do I need to put info in the Album Artist field? Is that why I don't have artists showing up?

Thanks!
Brian

[elusien]

This can happen if there is more than one singer with the same name. Try going into the Information Context menu (press the letter 'i') for one of the artists and click on 'refresh'. If it comes up with several names, they don't necessarily have to be identical, just similar, try each until you come up with the info, fanart and thumbnail for the correct one. Mind you doing that for 4000 artists is going to take a long, long time, but I don't know of any other way I'm afraid.

[Brian B]

I'm in the process of retagging a lot of my music anyway. I'll try what you are suggesting as well. I just removed the shares and will re-add and re-scan once I've done this. I'll see how much better it works afterwards.

Thanks,
Brian

[Jogee]

The wiki link on adding music to the library explains what is happening.

I always add the album artist info when tagging my music, but that's my personal pref.

[scott967]

The wiki link on adding music to the library explains what is happening.

There appears to be a bit of change in how this works in Gotham. It seems that once a tentative "album artist" has been found via that method, a query is made to musicbrainz and the top result (if any) is used by storing the artist MBID in the database and using the musicbrainz "normalized" artist name as the album artist in the database. This can result in song artist and album artist being different strings. At least that is how it seems to me in testing. I haven't seen any documentation on just what the changes are for Gotham on music scanning. There is a new option for music artist scraping using local info only. I objected to using the musicbrainz query in this case, and the devs did revise the scanner so it no longer does this. But it seems in this case even if you have local artist thumb and/or fanart you can't get it assigned by the local only scraper, nor can you do it manually on the artist info page. The only way (as of alpha 11) I kind find is to use the artist.nfo file.

scott s.
.

[Brian B]

I'm still using Frodo so I'm not too concerned about this change. I'm still tagging a lot of my music, so haven't seen if the album artist tag will greatly improve the id and not require me to have to go in and manually select for so many artists.

Thanks,
B.