[PushPull]

Hi everyone, using KODI 15.with MySQL/advancedsettings.xml. I'm trying to clean up my music library by starting from scratch adding a few albums at a time to verify tagging. When I add the first album I go in on artist information and set the thumbnail + fanart I want, then as soon as I've added second album of the same artist it appears that artist thumbnail + fanart is reset ? It loops back to the thumbnail + fanart I first got when the artist was added to library for the first time.

Is there any particular setting that can cause this, or is it a bug ?

[PushPull]

Anyone ? The URL below explains a sorta similar problem, but checking "Fetch additional information during updates" under Music - Library (which I assume is the setting he is referring to) makes no difference. As soon as I add new music on a particular artist I get the default fanart + default thumb, and have to manually set the artwork I want all over again.

Forum URL to sorta similar case:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=198452

On a sidenote: When scraping with default scrapers I often get i.e. fanart but no artist thumbnail, while there are lots of thumbnails available as remote thumbnails when I manually click the get thumb button. Is there any way to ensure an artist thumbnail is always set as well?

[DaveBlake]

It is not adding the second album that is the problem but the scraping that happens when you do. Unfortunately if you have "Fetch additional information during updates" enabled, or if you chose "Query Information for All" from the context menu then any individual changes you may have to artwork will be over written by what the scraper finds.

The way around this, as I understand it but not something I have done, is to create NFO files for each artist/album with the artwork you want and scrape from NFO rather than external database. Otherwise you could add all the music, scrape, change the ones that you want or that the scrapwer didn't find, and then never scrape again!

I have to say I found it frustrating when I first started using Kodi. The initial delight at all the pretty images that appeared soon turned to dispair when it kept re-setting them (and then the "infinite dialog loop" struck too, a bug fixed in Jarvis). Since I listen to music mostly with TV off I decided that the eye-candy was not worth the effort.

I am pretty sure there are user requests already asking for better control of this stuff for users.

On a sidenote: When scraping with default scrapers I often get i.e. fanart but no artist thumbnail, while there are lots of thumbnails available as remote thumbnails when I manually click the get thumb button. Is there any way to ensure an artist thumbnail is always set as well?

I think this is down to scraper settings, but perhaps someone else can tell us.

[PushPull]

Hi and thanks for the input, much appreciated. Yeah I played around with the idea of creating an nfo file, but I have a HUGE music library so creating nfo files for each artist will be quite a job. Besides unless I include all info on the artist that is normally downloaded (when he started to perform, where he's from etc) this part will be empty.

Basically all I want is to be able to pick a thumbnail + fanart and make it stick even if I add more music to library from same artist. It seems very, very strange if there's no way to do so. For anyone with a semi-large music archive having to redo artwork over and over is annoying as H**L. Also I'd be happy if an artist thumbnail is assigned automatically like fanart on music where there obviously are thumbnails available. I.e. Pearl Jam, which is the band I am testing to add one album at a time on now: For every album I add the thumb+fanart I've picked are wiped, the default fanart is added and thumbnail is empty. But when clicking "Get thumb" there are 10+ remote thumbnails to pick from.

By the way, I disabled both "fetch additional information during updates" + the prefer online information setting, tried adding a new album again, but thumbnail & fanart are still reset with these settings disabled :S

[DaveBlake]

Basically all I want is to be able to pick a thumbnail + fanart and make it stick even if I add more music to library from same artist. It seems very, very strange if there's no way to do so. For anyone with a semi-large music archive having to redo artwork over and over is annoying as H**L.

Yeap, I get that I really do.

Just adding more music works fine for me, doesn't reset previously set artwork. Then again I embedded thumbnail art in every track and don't scrape. I am sure it is the scraping that is the issue.

The idea is that the scraper will quietly automatically make everything look nice, which it does sometimes. But if you have a diverse music collection, or like to take control of how things look, then things are not ideal.

Also I'd be happy if an artist thumbnail is assigned automatically like fanart on music where there obviously are thumbnails available. I.e. Pearl Jam, which is the band I am testing to add one album at a time on now: For every album I add the thumb+fanart I've picked are wiped, the default fanart is added and thumbnail is empty. But when clicking "Get thumb" there are 10+ remote thumbnails to pick from.

I really am not sure about that bit. Generally I find if the scraper doesn''t find a thumb then there aren't any to choose from. I thought that the scraper setting allowed for fallback sources for thumbs. Perhaps someone else can help here?

By the way, I disabled both "fetch additional information during updates" + the prefer online information setting, tried adding a new album again, but thumbnail & fanart are still reset with these settings disabled :S

Did you "Query Information for all" ? Just scanning music into the library will not change the album and artist artwork.

You could try setting the information source to local/NFO for artists that you have chosen an image for. Not sure if this will help.

I have a vague memory of someone setting the lastscraped date (using SQL) to solve something in this area, but not sure if it was this.

[PushPull]

I am not running "query information for all", the albums I add are either picked up by WatchDog addon or I've scanned it manually. And every time the library is updated one way or another with a new album I get the reset on thumb+fanart on the particular artist, all other artist artwork remains. And it's the same on all artists.

I totally agree, it must be a scraper issue or a particular setting I have during scraping. I dunno, but I'd really really like to find a solution where I don't have to do manual nfos on this amount of artists

When it comes to thumbnails not being auto-added I have no clue either. It's all strange since they are available manually on the "Get thumb" button :S

[DaveBlake]

I'm at a bit of a loss as I can't repeat the problem as you describe it, sorry I'm not being much help.

Could it be something to do with the WatchDog addon? I don't have that installed.

[scott967]

I use local art for all my music. I use artist/album folder structure and have cover art in the tags for every file. In the album folder I also have the cover art as folder.jpg (only really used for file-mode browsing). In the parent artist folder I have the artist thumb art as folder.jpg and the artist fanart as fanart.jpg. The local art is always picked up during a library scan, regardless if the album or artist gets data from a scrape. I have to manually select the remote art if desired. When you do a library export, the current art definition is exported, but it isn't read when you import the same file back in. It is possible to get around that by copying the info from the "art" element in the export data into the "thumb" and/or "fanart' elements (those 2 elements normally contain the URLs of remote art from the scraper. But I think if you scrape again that info you entered will be overwritten.

scott s.
.

[PushPull]

Thanks for the input guys. I guess I'll have to use local art if this is actually how KODI works by design, although that seems really strange to me :S If I have to go for local artwork, any suggestions on software that will let me pick thumb/fanart and will automatically store the artwork in the correct location with correct naming?

And if anyone else have input on this feel free to shout I still can't believe there's no workaround for this issue. And it's strange you can't reproduce it as well. My setup should be pretty straight forward: Kodi 15.2, SQL, scraping with default scrapers, music located on windows fileshare and watchdog is the only relevant addon. Although I doubt WatchDog has anything to do with it since I get the same issue when scanning manually.

[Powerhouse]

Look into MediaElch, which now allows you to Scrap Music (as well as TV and Movies).

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=136333

[DaveBlake]

I have still been trying to reproduce this behaviour, and it is bugging me that I can't.

The artwork does get overwritten if you scrape. I think the design philosophy was that automation always knows best, and anything you may have selected just gets lost. This is frustrating, and if I can get my other work done I will have a look at it.

But PushPull is saying it overwrites when he hasn't scraped (or got any of the automatic scraping settings enabled). Does anyone else experience that because I don't.

[scott967]

Thanks for the input guys. I guess I'll have to use local art if this is actually how KODI works by design, although that seems really strange to me :S If I have to go for local artwork, any suggestions on software that will let me pick thumb/fanart and will automatically store the artwork in the correct location with correct naming?

And if anyone else have input on this feel free to shout I still can't believe there's no workaround for this issue. And it's strange you can't reproduce it as well. My setup should be pretty straight forward: Kodi 15.2, SQL, scraping with default scrapers, music located on windows fileshare and watchdog is the only relevant addon. Although I doubt WatchDog has anything to do with it since I get the same issue when scanning manually.

I've never experienced your issue so can't help with it. By design as I understand, when you scan music it reads tags and finds local art, including embedded (tagged) art that follows location and naming conventions. Links to those local arts are stored in the "art" table of the database. Then it runs the designated album and/or artist scraper iff a new artist or album is detected. The scraper retrieves and stores URLs to remote art in either the "artist" or "album" table as appropriate. I'm not sure when art that is linked in eg. the artist table is also added to the art table (for the most part, few of my artists scrape any art so I don't pay much attention.) Also, I think video art works the same way.

Also by design, when Kodi needs to display an art, it queries the "art" table and then loads the appropriate arttype into the textures database, which links to a thumbnail copy of the art that is created locally. It is this thumbnail image that actually gets displayed. There is some logic that periodically updates the textures database, but it can get "out of sync" with the art table. Also there is no logic that removes thumbnails that are no longer referenced by textures database. Keep in mind when reading/discussing that "thumbnail" used in this context means a copy of an art that is stored locally in your Kodi userdata folders. It is not the same thing as a "thumb" which is an arttype (as is "fanart") associated with a database entity.

scott s.
.

[PushPull]

@DavidBlake
Hi, not sure if I explained myself properly: Yes there is scraping regardless. I have WatchDog addon, which automatically scrapes when it senses new content is added on the music source. Or I've scraped manually. So from what I understand my whole issue is by design. Seems meaningless artist thumb/artwork is rescraped whenever more albums of an existing artist, with existing thumb/artwork, is added. But if this is the way it works I recon 3rd party software downloading artist.jpg etc is my best option. So question now is to find the best software.

MediaElch seems pretty shitty with KODI to be honest, at least with music. I might be missing something here but I added a test folder as music source, with 2 very known artists and hit Reload Music/F5. As long as the folder structure is
testfolder\artist1\artist1-name-of-album
testfolder\artist2\artist2-name-of-album
...then artist info is downloaded when I hit the scrape button based on the testfolder\<artist name>

However it's not scraping the albums, despite mp3 tags being fine. I need to manually click scrape on each album, then modify the name popping up to album name only (as it's obviously not able to scrape based on <artist>-<albumname>) - then pick from a huge list of albums (US edition, UK edition etc). This is gonna take forever. What am I missing ? Looks like MediaElch is not even looking at the mp3 id tags which should contain everything it needs to scrape each album.

Edit:
Ok, so after a bit more browsing around I understand MediaElch does not inspect id tags. There's obviously no win-win here So I'm concluding my best approach is to scrape artists only in MediaElch so that KODI will stick to the .jpgs stored whenever I add more albums, then let KODI scrape each albums so that albums will be scraped based on id tags.

Regardless I really think KODI should change it's current music scraping. With the current design it's pointless to spend time organizing artists & artwork within KODI when everything you manually set is overwritten with no prompt whenever new content on an existing artist is added.

[scott967]

I don't know that it is possible to "automatically scrape" music. AFAIK, if Kodi gets the command to update the music library, it runs a hash check on all paths in the music sources. If any are changed, it then scans the affected folder for new/missing/changed files, using the file tags. If the result of this is a new artist or album is added to the database, it then calls the selected scraper for the album or artist. If there is a match to an existing artist or album, but the "last scraped" attribute is null, I don't know if it will also run a scrape on those artists/albums or not. I don't think I have ever seen a scrape done of an artist or album with a valid "last scraped" attribute.

Scraping updates 2 art attributes in the database for artist: strImage which is a structured list of URLs for "thumbs" and strFanart which is a structured list of URLs for "fanart" . Albums only have 1 attribute , strImage. If you do a single-file export of the music library, you can examine the contents of those attributes. If a new found artist is not also an album artist, it is considered a "compilation" artist. I'm not sure, but I suspect how art is managed for compilation artists differs from album artists. (Kodi will scan local folders for local album artist art.)

I did a test on a compilation artist, and if I do a "reload" from the MusicInformation dialog, the current art gets reset to the first remote image returned by the scraper. Unfortunately the debug log only results in an "OnUpdate" response, doesn't say that it reset the current art. Same thing happens if I browse and select an art file via the file browser -- "reload" resets to the first remote art.

Testing on album artists, in this case I have local artist art in the parent folder "folder.jpg" and "fanart.jpg". The scanner finds these and lists them as "local" art. It appears that on a "reload" it will always reset to the "local art" if it exists, otherwise the first "remote" art.

I have settings "fetch addl info during updates" on and "search for thumbs on remote shares" on, though I don't know what these do.

ISTM that part of the problem is that music art is "pre-Frodo" compared to video. If it was possible to assign art as artistname-thumb.jpg and artistname-fanart.jpg it might be easier to have those used as the default current art if they exist. Then you could re-scrape without it messing with the art if you have taken the time to set it locally.

scott s.
.

[DaveBlake]

Scott "fetch additional info during updates" enabled causes kodi to scrape artist and album data when scanning tags from changed files to update the library creates new artists or albums. I would call that an "automatically scraping" option! The OP has an addon that causes scraping in a similar manner.

I don't think I have ever seen a scrape done of an artist or album with a valid "last scraped" attribute.

So amendments to art post scraping should not be subsequently lost by scraping new artists & albums. I have to wonder if it is the watchdog addon that is causing the OP the problems, or at least making it worse?

But yes, local art management in music does need some work.