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Magic815 · 2016-09-18, 00:53

Had a question - what's the easiest way to get background images shown when music is playing? (Preferably auto-scrapped images of the artist/band and not packs I need to manually download and link to).

Right now I'm more or less running Kodi 16.1 'out of the box' and noticed that it defaults to various visualizers when music plays. I'd prefer to have something that scrapped artist images, and just made slideshows out of that while the music played. Does anyone have their setup doing that? If so, how?

**black_eagle** · 2016-09-18, 09:19

Look in your add-ons and see if Artist Slideshow is already installed and install it from the official repo if not. It does exactly what you are wanting Smile

Magic815 · (This post was last modified: 2016-09-18, 21:45 by Magic815.)

Awesome. I just installed it, but do I need to run it first? Now when I play music, it has a black background instead of the visualizer.

Edit: Just tried to run it (I've left all config settings in the addon to their defaults), and nothing seemed to happen. Tried a couple Kodi reboots, and still nothing. Any ideas?

**black_eagle** · 2016-09-19, 06:34

What's the source of your music ? Stuff you have added into Kodi's music library, or an internet stream ?

Magic815 · (This post was last modified: 2016-09-19, 07:02 by Magic815.)

It's all music locally on my machine. Although I do have Emby as my backend (but the Emby Kodi addon has "enable music library" unchecked, so I believe it's bypassing Emby. And Emby and Kodi are both on the same machine right now.

Artist slideshow is still at it's default config. I didn't set a local directory, and its set to "remote first". I also didn't add any extra sources (htbackdrops.org).

Also, I'm using Arctic Zephyr skin, with Kodi 16.1.

**black_eagle** · 2016-09-19, 07:08

Your files are tagged right ? Preferably with Musicbrainz ID's. There's a whole massive thread on AS on here. The author is extremely helpful so if your files are indeed tagged and you still don't get results, he's the guy to ask.

If your stuff isn't tagged, then although it may seem a pain to do it, I'd highly recommend it.

Magic815 · (This post was last modified: 2016-09-19, 16:20 by Magic815.)

Most of them should be. I ported over my music from iTunes to MediaMonkey a little over a year ago, and in the process used Musicbrainz and Mp3Tag to clean up my music library as best I could. Is there an easy way to see if each music has has a musicbrainz ID associated with it? Also, I found that AS thread, and made a post in there as well. Your help here is much appreciated, though!

**black_eagle** · 2016-09-19, 16:24

Yeah, erm.....Don't just use htbackdrops.org, turn on Fanart.tv and theaudiodb too !! You might get better results then. FWIW, I have everything enabled on there. I think at some point, AS will require you to have your own API key for fanart.tv, but I think at the moment you don't need one.

Magic815 · 2016-09-19, 16:32

Ok, all are now enabled, and I hit run. But again, I don't get any feedback that run is doing anything. Does it just take a while? Should I be seeing some processing bar?

**black_eagle** · (This post was last modified: 2016-09-19, 16:59 by black_eagle.)

You shouldn't need to run it, most skins call it automatically when you are in the music full screen visualisation (press backspace on keyboard after starting playing some music). It may take a while at first while it identifies the playing artist and looks for art/bio etc but it caches this locally so subsequent lookups are quicker. Most mainstream artists (and quite a lot of not so mainstream) from the last 40 years should show at least one picture I would have thought.

This is from a radio stream so I have no local art for the artist.

**scott967** · 2016-09-19, 22:16

Default Confluence (nor Estuary on 17 I think) skins don't have support for Artist Slideshow. There are mod files available for those, or install a skin that natively uses AS.

scott s.
.