[droffy]

I have tried to resolve this myself with Google and the excellent forums here, but its driving me mad, i have sorted my movie collection and that is now how i want it, i used ember to scrape all info i want into the folders and i like that.

With my music i am trying to do a similar thing, i want all off the info stored in the folders, my music collection is already in a good condition as i have been pretty anal about folder jpg's and correct tags long before i started to use XBMC.

i have used CDArt manager which is great for extra fanart, But what i really want to know is can i have Artist thumbs and fanart in the folders and then use that instead of having to scrape with allmusic or last fm? i have scraped with the last 2 and it works well, i then tried to export the library but that did not seem to work. All i want is to not have to scrape or depend on the services above for my information.

[tcman47]

yeah, it's a pain, nothing really out there that works 100%, I don't even use artist thumbs and have manually downloaded music fanart over the years.

[droffy]

Well after several days of reading, searching and trial and error, this is what i have found.

every album needs to be in a folder for the artist (most of mine were), then you can drop an folder.jpg (this will be scapped as artist thumb) into this folder with a fanart.jpg, then when you add this into your library XBMC scrapes this and you have what you want.

The only downside to this is that it can be time consuming if you have a massive collection (but then you will only have to do this once).

Also last FM scraper does quite a good job of scraping for popular albums, you can run that then use artwork manager plugin to export all of the thumbs and fanart to folders (these need to be renamed to folder.jpg for artist thumb and fanart.jpg then put in the right artist Dirs).

the CDart plugin is also good at getting extrafanart and CD pics this is good as if you are using the above folder structure it will put the files in the correct place for you.

my layout

Artist (folder)
folder.jpg (this will be the artist thumbnail)
fanart.jpg (this will be the fanart)
Album (folder)
tracks
folder.jpg (cd cover)
cdart.png

hope this helps, i got a few more days of moving, renaming and finding missing art but then it will be as nice as my movie collection.