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Full Version: A few music/music video questions
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Ok, I've been using XBMC for years but never really considered using it for music. I have several dedicated music jukebox programs for that but after playing around with XBMC with cdartdownloaded addon I really like it and may be using it more than I thought.

However just like my movies/tv shows I would like full functionality even if not online.
So I would like to have all data stored locally.

I already have a music library that has been meticulously tagged but may be in need of some updating for my purposes.

So first I just want to confirm that XBMC and CDartdownloader will use all local data before looking online including...
clearlogo
fanart
cdart
banner
/extrafanart
album.nfo
artist.nfo

I am currently acquiring everything above manually that cdartdownloader did not do automatically as well as updating any album art that is lower than 1000x1000.

One of the things I really liked about xbmc was that it automatically fetched the lyrics.
Now I know these can be included in the tags but I added lyrics to a few songs to test (and reloaded) and disconnected my computer from the internet and it did not use the lyrics.
Is this a supported tag within XBMC?
I have used Tag&Rename for my files for years but decided to play around with Media Monkey today and it downloads lyrics quite easily. I was going to update my library with lyrics but if the software does not recognize them then I am not going to go through all the effort.

VIDEOS... I have quite a few music videos.... probably 700ish mostly DVD rips. I know XBMC has never been to friendly with these but I know people have had success with them.
I was wondering what the best folder and naming structure was. Currently I have a Music Videos folder with a folder named for each artist with subfolder called videos....
Music Videos/artist/videos/title.mkv
I was thinking of simply moving all of the video folders to the corresponding artist folders in my music directory.
Is there any benefit to keeping them with the music or separate?
Also even though they are in an artist directory it seems from things I've read that I would be better off renaming the files as
artist - title.mkv and then providing an nfo for each file.

One last thing. Is there any GUI software out there something like the movie/tv data programs like Ember Media Manager that I could use for music?
Basically something to make the album and artist nfo's easier (including the <review> and <biography> tags) as well as the music video nfo's.
Wanilton posted in another thread a video here
nfo editor
Looks pretty nice for this but its not in English... I could probably even manage to intuitively use the program he is using but I don't think its available to the public for downloading.
All good questions and I can see as yet not a lot of feed back.
I am also interested to read more of peoples experiences with XBMC as their Music frontend.

As yet, I am not joyful about it, as once you have a large collection of Music there is many problems attached to getting it all setup just right.
I have been lucky to inherit about a 1T of Albums and so far its been a bit of a hand full setting them up for XBMC.

Mind you, with that in mind its more a timing issue as I know you have to spend the time to make sure everything is tagged right so that all the Album art will show up. Then setting up playlists and smart playlists.
but its on the cards to do... as the Movie and TV section of my XBMC setup is almost done now so i can spend a few weeks/Months sorting out the music side of things.

Look forward to reading more on the subject.
(2014-03-04, 23:02)huttdes Wrote: [ -> ]VIDEOS... I have quite a few music videos.... probably 700ish mostly DVD rips. I know XBMC has never been to friendly with these but I know people have had success with them.
I was wondering what the best folder and naming structure was. Currently I have a Music Videos folder with a folder named for each artist with subfolder called videos....
Music Videos/artist/videos/title.mkv
I was thinking of simply moving all of the video folders to the corresponding artist folders in my music directory.
Is there any benefit to keeping them with the music or separate?
Also even though they are in an artist directory it seems from things I've read that I would be better off renaming the files as
artist - title.mkv and then providing an nfo for each file.

From what I've gathered from scratching around the forums, it seems the most recommended method is to create smart playlists for concerts (I assume what you mean by music videos ripped from DVDs) and include these in the movie library. These can then be scraped if they are in the imdb database. For me this doesn't make too much sense and in my very humble opinion, xbmc is a little lack-lustre and rough around the edges when it comes to the music side of things (I have voiced my gripes in this thread: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=157377).

Good luck in getting what you want to achieve here. I'll be interested to know if you succeed!