[sadsack5000]

Dudes,

I've just installed a fresh copy of jarvis 16.1 and added the titan skin.... that is all.

Using all the default settings, not changing a thing, i scanned in my NAS music share (via NFS) per wiki (http://kodi.wiki/view/Adding_music_to_the_library) and all music is added to the library no problem.

Now i've found there are absolutely no artist thumbs whatsoever. Was i supposed to do something before scanning in that is not in the wiki perhaps? I have not toyed around with any scrapers or such as i quite often see discussion about in these forums. As far as i am aware the default scraper was universal artist scraper.


Have tried:
Tried music share over SMB instead of NFS (after wipe and re-add)..... still no artist thumbs
Query info for all artists - does nothing
Artist info -> Get thumb - gives "No Thumb" or Browse (locally) for every artist which makes me think there is no online scraping going on

p.s. access to the SMB or NFS share is read only does that matter? Im pretty sure on previous kodi installs the artist thumbs scraped with these shares read only

Your help is appreciated

[DaveBlake]

Artist artwork needs to be scraped. Because people were having problems with tagging files consistently automatic scraping on library update is not enabled by default, so that users can scan their music into the library and check that goes OK first. Having done that "Query Info for all" is the correct way to fetch artwork.

So what you have tried is correct, however there are a couple of things that could have gone wrong.
a) the Musicbrainz server, fundamental to the Universal Scraper being able to get data, is having issues and is frequently not responding. You could retry, or maybe switch the scraper settingss to use a mirror server as mentioned here http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2340855

b) Unfortunately there is a bug in Kodi 16, a variable isn't initialsed, that means "Query Info for all" only does something when there has been a library update since after power-up. So click "library update" before you click "Query Info for all".

You may get artwork for some artists and not others, if the mssing ones are popular then again that is probably a server traffic issue. Retry to fill in the gaps.

At least that is my guess at what is happening. If that does not get anywhere then turn on debugging and provide a log for what happens when you attempt to ""Query Info for all"

[sadsack5000]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. As advised i ran a library update before performing the query and artist thumbs have started populating. I also added http://musicbrainz.fin-alice.de:5000/ as a mirror and power cycled my HTPC just to be sure. I would say 65% have received an artist thumb after leaving the query to complete.

This is a good catch and is not covered by the wiki so hopefully when others have the same problem your advice will help them too

Just to close this one out entirely what is the best way to fill the gap artists that you know of? Or is it a case of manually refreshing, select correct artist, select thumb?

Good work!

[DaveBlake]

This is a good catch and is not covered by the wiki so hopefully when others have the same problem your advice will help them too

Yes that wiki is out of date, and will need updating further for v17. Volunteers always welcome, I figure there are more people able to write wiki than there are those able to design and implement software, and there are only so many hours in a day. There is another guide from Zag, but I keep loosing where that is located (sorry Zag, but the organic wiki structure does not make finding things obvious). Meanwhile I try to fill the forum with good answers and hope that Google will lead people to them. Also easier for me to answer questions than draft an explanation from zero and cover all the details.

Just to close this one out entirely what is the best way to fill the gap artists that you know of? Or is it a case of manually refreshing, select correct artist, select thumb?

Depends on what is causing the gaps.

For best scraping success tag your music files using Musicbrainz ids (both Picard and Mp3tag will do that). The scraper uses these IDs to access the right info in all the other data sources, if they are there. Otherwise it does a Musicbrainz search based on artist name, and sometimes name is not enough and it mayget the wrong artist. If the artist isn't in Musicbrtainz database then it isn't able to scarpe anything. In that case do the comminity a favour and add them. I hope the server issues will improve eventually.

I hear there is a nice artist art addod called cdArt, but again mbids are key.

But chances are your gaps are down to server being overwhelmed. I was getting a 1 in 5 hit rate a one time, Sunday at 3pm is particularly busy apparently. Update library and "query info for all" should eventually fill out the common artists. Retry one at a time manually is also an approach if they could be less well known.

Then again you could use local art instead. If all you want is art, and the artist is one that has a unique common path, e.g. all the songs that they perform on lie beneath one common artist folder, then you can put artwork for that artist in folder.jpg in that folder. When first "query info for all" it will find such local image and use them rather than scrape online.

To be fair I am not an artwork expert, someone else may have better instructions, or there are other posts on this forum worth reading.

[sadsack5000]

Fantastic, all good advice Dave so again thanks for taking the time to respond

I am crazy anal over my mp3 tags having literally spent in the hundreds of man-hours over the years perfecting them. Its my little OCD thing unfortunately lol
With that being said i have synchronised most of my artists to last.fm and not to musicbrainz so perhaps thats my next project. When i do a manual refresh kodi picks up the artist 99% of the time but perhaps some of the more obscure artists are slightly different to muscibrainz which i will rectify

Once again thanks for the help!

[Mike_Doc]

sync them to TADB as well as musicbrainz please, TADB is used by some scrapers.

And no matter how long you spend on your music it'll never be perfect ;-)

[DaveBlake]

I'm a tag fanatic too, and slowly ensuring that Kodi makes best use of all of them

Mike is right, if you have albums not in TADB, check out theaudiodb.com, then do spend some time adding them for the benefit of the community.

Just to clarify AKAIK if your music files don't already have them then the scraper uses the Musicbrainz database to get Musicbrainz IDs for albums and artists matching on name. These mbids are then used to get information from the other online sources such as TADB. So artists and albums need to be in the Musicbrainz database or scraping can only find local NFO file data. If your have artists or releases missing from Musicbrainz online database then do add them there too.

You can use Kodi in isolation, only using locally supplied information in the music file tags and scraping NFO files and local artwork. That is absolutely fine, and if your music tastes are unusual may be all you can do. There are some difficulties with compilations, multiple artist albums, and artists that don't have a unique common path, but I may eventually get to fix that.

However if you prefer to access the information and artwork available online then tagging with Musicbrainz IDs will improve the accuracy and efficiency of the scraping process.

[sadsack5000]

Cheers DaveBlake, again that must have taken you a while to write out so i appreciate your time to respond. Given that i have a lot of Mp3s - circa 12,000 is there any such tool that can scan your artists and give nearest matches to musicbrainz/TADB and then rename? That would at least cull down my list so i can then go about adding the remainders manually to these online DB's

[DaveBlake]

Nice music collection.

Your issue is that having scraped 35% of artists are not showing thumbnails or fan art. You have not tagged with Musicbrainz IDs. The gaps could be because an artist with that name is not being found in Musicbrainz database, or because even the mirror server is timing out, or because when you do a "Query Info for all" Kodi isn't actually checking those artists (remember the bug I mentioned in a previous post).

Well using something like Picard to add Musicbrainz tags could help, but you need to explore how to use that effectively and it is a lot of music to lookup.

It is worth retrying the scraping again too, at one point I was getting only 1 in 5 lookup working because over server overload. Otherwise I would say try refreshing the missing ones artist at a time, if they can't be found on Musicbrainz the scraper will ask for the name again (that tells you it is having aproblem). It could also be work scraping with debug enabled, the log will show what artists it can't get.