[Cath Barkley]

I have a big problem with how the music library is handled in XBMC currently. When you export your library, you can either export to a single .XML file, or as separate artist.nfo, fanart.jpg and folder.jpg files. When you export it to a single file you lose all your thumbnails and fanart. When you export it to separate files it theoretically allows you to keep them, but this hasn’t been the case in my experience.

The way I like to have my music structured is as follows: I have one folder for my mp3s and another for my .flac files - I like to keep these completely separate. Then inside these I have folders for each artist. I also have around 150 compilations, and because it would make things far too complicated for me to have separate folders for each of these artists because it would mean splitting the albums over several folders, I instead have a “various artists” folders where these are kept.

Because my library is not perfectly arranged into the proper structure the “export to separate files per entry” option does not work properly. The .nfos and fanart files get exported here, there and everywhere – that is the ones that do export; 90% of them don’t get exported at all. And for some reason even after I used a tool to arrange my music in the “proper” structure (after making a backup copy of my music in the structure that I like, of course) it still only worked for around 60% of the artists – the rest still did not get exported at all. So this means hours upon hours of work to get all my artists to have the right thumbnails and fanart again.

My suggestion: have an option to export your music library in separate files to a separate directory altogether. And have XBMC create the folder structure. So you would still have the library exported as

- Artistnamefolder
- - artist.nfo
- - folder.jpg
- - fanart.jpg
- - albumnamefolder

but it would be kept completely separate from the music, and the artistname folders would be created by XBMC.

Yeah, I understand that wherever possible it’s always best to keep the metadata with the media, so I conform to the standards for my movies and TV shows. But for people like me, this is simply not possible for music, so making an option to keep the metadata separate from the music files just makes SO much more sense.

Thoughts?

[jmarshall]

I believe the chief problem here is dual sources of information: The export is only in charge of exporting scraped information. Tag info ofc does not need exporting. My theory is, then, that the stuff that was exported (ignoring compilations, as I have no doubt there's issues there) was stuff that was scraped, while the stuff that wasn't exported was stuff that wasn't scraped. Might that be the case?

I propose first fixing the export to single XML file, as that's the one that doesn't depend on the users' filesystem, and thus should be easiest to make reliable.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Cath Barkley]

I believe the chief problem here is dual sources of information: The export is only in charge of exporting scraped information. Tag info ofc does not need exporting. My theory is, then, that the stuff that was exported (ignoring compilations, as I have no doubt there's issues there) was stuff that was scraped, while the stuff that wasn't exported was stuff that wasn't scraped. Might that be the case?

Possibly. Although it seems like some of the compilation-only artists have exported properly as has some of the information that was not scraped. So at this stage I can't quite pin down what the exact problem is, but I would at least say that your suspicions are correct for at least a majority, but definitely not all, of the artists who failed to export properly.

The export to single XML file option seems to work perfectly at exporting artist information even for artists found only on compilations. The only issue is that no fanart or thumbnails are exported with it. If that could be changed then it would absolutely be an excellent solution.

I think that the export to folders option that I suggested is probably still slightly better because it gives you an easy option to edit .nfo files manually, then re-scrape into XBMC. For example, often when you source your artist biographies from last.fm there is more than one artist with the same name. If you were feeling pedantic you could remove mention of the other artists manually by editing the .nfo file. Or if fanart for an artist is not available on one of the online databases you could copy and paste it into its correct place in the library quite easily, then choose to re-scrape rather than having to use the browse option in XBMC. Multiple instances of XBMC throughout the home could use the library folders to create their local cache. It would be so handy to have a central database of artist information stored on the server. If XBMC is creating the folder structure for the database itself then I see no reason why it would need to depend on the users' filesystem, but of course there may be something I'm overlooking here. If it's true that this would be difficult to implement then a better export to single XML file would still be an absolutely massive step forward.