[WIP] Artist Slideshow Script (looking for testers!)

Hi Ronie, reporting everything working like a charm ... added to cirrus extended ...
Just great ! Thanx again for sharing a long awaited and very useful feature.

Cheers

Hi Ronie,

Thanks so much for this. Really awesome develpoment in the slickness of XBMC's music interface.

One request if you're still working on this, which I originally made to divingmule but I guess is most relevant to you now:

kiboy6 Wrote:Love this addon - many thanks.

Hoping it will get integrated into my favourite skin BackRow so it can start automatically when a song plays.

Two small things I was wondering about:

1. Would there be any way to only get images from last.fm above a certain size?

2. Some skins (like BackRow) allow for a slideshow of images from an "extrafanart" folder inside the artist's folder.

Would it be possible for this last.fm slideshow addon to check for locally stored extrafanart and add these images to the slideshow? *Would also be cool to add the default library fanart for the artist, via exported fanart.jpg if ness.*

I love this addon, but would still love to see all the extrafanart images i painstakingly added to many artists in my collection

Thanks so much again for making this cool addon.

One other cool feature, that I'd be sad to lose from the old extrafanrt based visualisation: When an artist had no available fanart, Sharpe wrote a cool feature into Backrow that allowed you to designate a folder containing generic music "extrafanart". If this too could somehow be integrated into this new script that would be amazing.

Thanks so much again

Damn your fast! With beta 2 this one is solved.
Again, thanks a bunch!

siffredi Wrote:When I play a song by an artist that has not been played before, the script shows only the first downloaded image until the next song starts. More images are downloaded to the thumbnail folder but not displayed.

siffredi Wrote:Damn your fast! With beta 2 this one is solved.

cool, thanx for confirming :-)

kiboy6 Wrote:1. Would there be any way to only get images from last.fm above a certain size?

yes, the easiest way (for me) would be to reject any images below a certain filesize.
but, as divingmule mentioned, last.fm does provide heigth/width info for all images, so checking those would also be an option.

this will lead to one problem though: what if only low-res images are available for a certain artist?

kiboy6 Wrote:2. Some skins (like BackRow) allow for a slideshow of images from an "extrafanart" folder inside the artist's folder.

adding the default fanart and/or any extrafanart images, would mean i have to copy (duplicate) them over to the folder where the script downloads the last.fm images.

i'm thinking of a different approach, that could be handled by the skin instead of the script:
- 1) if extrafanart is available, show the extrafanart slideshow
- 2) if no extrafanart is available, fallback to the last.fm artist slideshow
- 3) if neither of the above return any images, display the default fanart image.

i haven't tested this myself yet, but it may be possible.

ronie Wrote:yes, the easiest way (for me) would be to reject any images below a certain filesize.
but, as divingmule mentioned, last.fm does provide heigth/width info for all images, so checking those would also be an option.

this will lead to one problem though: what if only low-res images are available for a certain artist

I, for one would probably prefer no images to a low-res image. Or perhaps only low-re images if not a single higher res image exists?

Quote:adding the default fanart and/or any extrafanart images, would mean i have to copy (duplicate) them over to the folder where the script downloads the last.fm images.

I see. Would it be impossible to modify the script to download last.fm images into each artist's folder directly? That way all images (local fanart and last.fm images)for each artist would be in the same place.

Quote:i'm thinking of a different approach, that could be handled by the skin instead of the script:
- 1) if extrafanart is available, show the extrafanart slideshow
- 2) if no extrafanart is available, fallback to the last.fm artist slideshow
- 3) if neither of the above return any images, display the default fanart image.

i haven't tested this myself yet, but it may be possible.

Sounds good. Is there any solution you can think of at skin level which would enable pics in the slideshow from both sources (last.fm and local). If I had to chose one or the other I'd probably always chose last.fm as their pics are so numerous and are updated without my involvement. However it would be great if the two slideshows could somehow be merged.

Thanks again Ronie

ronie Wrote:this will lead to one problem though: what if only low-res images are available for a certain artist?

Hi Ronie, fantastic job mate... limited fan art has been my biggest gripe about xbmc since I have been using it... but PLEASE do not remove fan art below a certain size, unless of course the user can optionally create a limitation if they want. The fan art IMO is just eye candy, so I would far prefer something than nothing at all.

ronie Wrote:i'm thinking of a different approach, that could be handled by the skin instead of the script:
- 1) if extrafanart is available, show the extrafanart slideshow
- 2) if no extrafanart is available, fallback to the last.fm artist slideshow
- 3) if neither of the above return any images, display the default fanart image.

sounds like a good idea.
My thoughts are that when browsing your library, it makes sense to use art, any art, that is available locally. When browsing, you often move rapidly through lists of artists and albums, so to try and download from LastFM 10 times in a second would probably slow the system down and be unnecessary... but from what I understand it seems your script only works in full screen playback mode only anyway, so this may be a moot point?

Exciting times...
Mark.

fredphoesh Wrote:My thoughts are that when browsing your library, it makes sense to use art, any art, that is available locally. When browsing, you often move rapidly through lists of artists and albums, so to try and download from LastFM 10 times in a second would probably slow the system down and be unnecessary...

and would violate the last.fm terms of service :-)

Quote:Your account may be suspended if your application is continuously making several calls per second.

fredphoesh Wrote:but from what I understand it seems your script only works in full screen playback mode only anyway, so this may be a moot point?

the script will only do anything when you're actually playing music.
it's not limited to showing the slideshow in the fullscreen window though.
the slideshow of the currently playing artist can be shown anywhere in the skin,
if a skinner decides to implement it that way.

but no, it can't be used to download artist artwork when you're just browsing your library.

ronie Wrote:and would violate the last.fm terms of service :-)

yeah, we definitely do NOT want to annoy lastFM into messing up this gem.

ronie Wrote:the script will only do anything when you're actually playing music.
it's not limited to showing the slideshow in the fullscreen window though.
the slideshow of the currently playing artist can be shown anywhere in the skin,
if a skinner decides to implement it that way.

hmm, that isnt what happens on my system... here are 3 screen grabs, the home screen, music browsing screen, full screen view (which is the only one which has lastFM images)








perhaps because I replaced the bright BG with a Grey.jpg?

tx
Mark.

fredphoesh Wrote:hmm, that isnt what happens on my system...

heh...i have not implemented that yet in the skin.

right now, we're just testing the functionality of the script.
full skin integration will follow as soon as i feel to script is stable enough for release. :-)