[fikhl]

Hello fellow XBMC/Kodi users!

I've been using the excellent MediaCompanion to get all the related infos for my movies and TV shows for local scraping in XBMC, and it's been great... way better and faster than net scraping.

Now I'm wondering if there's a similar application/process for music files. I mean .nfos, thumbs and banners for artists, albums, music videos, music concerts, etc.

My music collection is well organized -- metadata, artworks, everything in a clean and flat folder structure. All I need is the artists and albums infos.

Thanks.

[EngineerPeter]

Not really, I use the built in scrapers and for artists that don't come up, i add them to AudioDB. Then I add the files from Fanart.tv manually into my folders.

Keep an eye on this forum; http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=159323 as the software looks really promising, but no sign of anything yet.

I know it's not what you want to hear, but I don't know of any other way at the moment.

Pete

[Mike_Doc]

There is nothing, I've been looking for a while as I'm heavily looking at improving the music side of xbmc. I've recently messaged wanilton and he said it is still being worked on but it seems it will probably never happen after this long already. It is a shame as a music version of ember would be brilliant.

There is supposed to be a music manager, something called mycollections, but I've stayed away from it as the download package is apparently full of malware so I can't say it this application would help or not. I'm not willing to install and it seems there is no way to get a clean .zip etc. for installation?

On a side note, I've found a way to get mp3tag to produce both artist and album nfos. This is in the early stages but if you use mp3tag then I can let you know what to do to try building your own .nfos or at least have something which builds a nfo framework to work with in improving your music library.

[scott967]

Agree. Mycollections is full of crapware.

I gave up on mp3tag for nfos, because I could find no way to create a separate nfo for each artist/album/musicvideo. Had to do it one at a time which is a non-starter. It might be possible instead to create a single xml file (with all albums and artists or musicvideos) with mp3tag that could be imported but I haven't pursued that.

scott s.
.

[Mike_Doc]

Scott, my album.mte for mp3tag is recursive i.e. if you open all albums for one artist then it will create an album.nfo in each folder within the artist. I don't know what it will do for musicvideo but perhaps you can look at changing a few things in the following mte

$filename(%_folderpath%album.nfo,utf-8)<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
$loop(%_filename_ext%,1)$puts(avgtime,$add($get(avgtime),%_length_seconds%))$put​s(avgbitrate,$add($get(avgbitrate),%_bitrate%))$loopend()$loop(%album%)<album>
<title>%album%</title>
<artist>%artist%</artist>
<albumartist>%albumartist%</albumartist>
<genre>%genre%</genre>
<style>%genre%</style>
<mood>%mood%</mood>
<review></review>
<type>%mediatype%</type>
<releasedate>%year%</releasedate>
<label>%publisher%</label>
<copyright>%copyright%</copyright>
<thumb></thumb>
<path>%_folderpath%</path>
<rating></rating>
<year>%year%</year>$loop(%_filename_ext%)
<track>
<title>%title%</title>
<position>%track%</position>
<duration>%_length%</duration>
<comment>%comment%</comment>
</track>$loopend()
</album>$loopend()

LEDfan takes the credit for this .mte, I only applied the small change to make it be able to do all albums for an artist. See if it can help building .nfos for music videos. If you need help in how to use it just let me know.

[fikhl]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Well, that's disappointing. I like to keep as much info within the folder structure as possible so a database rebuild/disaster won't require rescraping every single artist or album.

There is this unofficial guide for music file structure, it still requires getting the fanarts and thumbs manually which is very very time consuming. And even then, the library still lacks proper infos for artists and albums.

Hierarchical Music Structure (Recommended)

-- Artist\
---- folder.jpg (2)
---- fanart.jpg (3)
---- Album 1\
------- 01 - Some Track.mp3 (2)
------- folder.jpg (2)
------- fanart.jpg (3)
------- cdart.png (9) *custom hack
---- Album 2\
------- CD1\
------------ 01 - Some Other Track.mp3
------- CD2\
------------ 01 - Yet Another Track.mp3
------- folder.jpg (2)
------- fanart.jpg (3)
------- cdart.png (9) *custom hack

Here's hoping someone will come up with a solution soon. it irks me knowing that my music library isn't on par with its movies and tv shows brethren!