2013-02-01, 15:31
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?
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?