[braz]

Just installed the latest Gotham nightly, dated 1/22, and it asked to scan my music library, which I let it do. As soon as it was finished, however, I noticed my artists were all messed up. For example, Beyonce had Shakira's artwork and bio, Alicia Keys had John Mayer's artwork and bio, etc. I also now have 3 artists named Bob Marley & The Wailers. Although the tags for all the songs have "Bob Marley & The Wailers", I'm assuming it's because MusicBrainz has them listed under Bob Marley, The Wailers, or Bob Marley & The Wailers.

FYI, I have a MySQL setup and all my music has complete tags from MB, although I've edited some of the artist fields to ensure that the albums show up where I want them to. I don't have artist.nfo in the folders as I liked to update artist info once in a while and found that it wouldn't search online in Frodo if there was an existing nfo file. Everything was working fine under Frodo, I just have this problem with Gotham. I tried wiping the music table in the db and rescanning everything, but it still has the same problems.

So my question is, why won't Gotham use my existing tags rather than what it finds in MusicBrainz? I could live with Bob Marley being in 3 places, but I don't even know what to do about the issues with Beyonce/Shakira, etc.

Thanks for the help!

[jmarshall]

There's a setting that ensures musicbrainz information doesn't overwrite tagging information (see settings->music). Pretty sure it defaults to using what's in your tags.

Otherwise, what we'll need (as always) is ways to reproduce faults. i.e. if a couple of songs aren't scanning correctly, isolate them to a folder and reproduce on that folder. Then provide said files for others to verify.

Only once faults are reproducible are they able to be fixed. The fixing is the easy bit

Cheers,
Jonathan

[braz]

I've been testing it several ways, deleting the db and starting over, removing the Frodo db, doing a fresh XBMC install on another computer using a local db, etc, and still having problems. When I took a peek at the Artist table in the Gotham db, you'll notice several artists have multiple entries. For example, there are several rappers listed as Alicia Keys.


http://www.bryanbrazil.net/xbmc/database.png

Here's what it looks like in XBMC. Notice that Alicia Keys shows up with John Mayer's artwork and biography.



This is the view inside Alicia Keys. Notice the John Mayer albums and only one track from Alicia Keys. My other Alicia Keys albums are missing.



When I go to John Mayer, I find Katy Perry albums and most of the John Mayer albums are missing.



I've also noticed that the scrapers are not using my local artwork (folder.jpg, fanart.jpg) for the artists and albums.

Here's a flac song from one of John Mayer's albums that shows up under Alicia Keys. It's the smallest one I could find, about 7 mb.
http://www.bryanbrazil.net/xbmc/08 John ...dfire.flac

Rescanning now to get a clean log to post...

[jmarshall]

Thanks for the file - will take a look.

[braz]

I deleted my XBMC log file, deleted the music db, started XBMC and rescanned my music source. I stopped it about half way through the scan, but the log file is already 29 mb. Want me to post the whole thing, or just the section where it is scanning Alicia Keys, for example?

Update: I pasted just the section of the log file where it is adding the Alicia Keys artists. You'll see that John Mayer/Beyonce and maybe other artist's info shows up in there.
http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=115307

[jmarshall]

Scanning that particular song placed in a folder by itself with default settings from Gotham gives 2 repeats for "John Mayer". When a lookup is done on each, one is John Mayer and the other is Frank Ocean. Reason is the song contains two musicbrainz_artistid's (one for John Mayer, the other for Frank Ocean), and a single artist field. Thus, by default we use the artist "John Mayer" but have disambiguated due to the two musicbrainz_artistid's. If you turn the setting "Override tags with online info" on, you'll get the two artists "John Mayer" and "Frank Ocean" listed.

I suggest you keep things simple. Move files you feel are being scraped incorrectly to a separate folder. Clear everything out and just scan that single folder. Ensure you get what you expect.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[braz]

Hmm, so it sounds like the scrapers are now using the musicbrainz_artistid's rather than the Artist field in the tag. That's too bad, I prefer the old method. I've also got all my Soundgarden albums showing up under Chris Cornell, etc.

Should I edit the tags for all of the problem albums/tracks and make sure there is only one artist ID for the artist I want? I definitely don't want the scraper to overwrite my tags and create additional artists.

Thanks for all your help, I really appreciate it!

[jmarshall]

It uses all the information in your tags. If your tags are wrong, that's too bad. Did you use Picard to tag? If so, a re-tag in Picard may be all that is needed?

[braz]

Yeah, I use Picard to tag everything. Just updated from Picard 1.1 to 1.2. In the past (Frodo) I was able to just edit the Artist field in the tag to prevent a track from showing up under a supporting artist. It sounds like that won't work anymore, I'll need to remove the extra ID from the MusicBrainz Artist ID too.

Still can't figure out why entire albums are showing up under the wrong artist, though, I'll keep checking...

[jmarshall]

There's 2 MusicBrainz Artist Id in the file you provided. The one you have, plus this one: e520459c-dff4-491d-a6e4-c97be35e0044 (Frank Ocean).

You can see this via a hexdump of the file for example.

XBMC uses Artist Id (and AlbumArtistId) - it doesn't use Release Artist ID or Release Group ID.

[scott967]

I've been playing around with MBID for music in Gotham for a while now. There is a new option in the music settings to keep what you have entered in artist / album artist tags if it conflicts with what MusicBrainz thinks the artist / ablum arist should be based on the MBID. That works. But you must be darned careful with those MBID. Any conflict of MBID in tag data will cause XBMC scanner to create a new artist entry (I'm not sure how it happened, but sometimes on different albums I had different album artist MBID for the same artist). You also need to be careful of the song artist vs album artist or you can get dupes in the database for that. Keep in mind from a scraping standpoint, it seems the first album artist tag is what the scraper will use, and MBID should match the first album artist. The MBID should be 144ef525-85e9-40c3-8335-02c32d0861f3

This:

If you turn the setting "Override tags with online info" on, you'll get the two artists "John Mayer" and "Frank Ocean" listed.

I haven't tried. Will have to fool around with this.
scott s.
.

[braz]

Trying to get things sorted, but running into roadblocks. Tried to clean my music library, but get an "Error cleaning artists".

Debug log:
http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=115383

Couldn't clean the library, so dropped the music db and started over. Tried cleaning the library again after importing some tracks, and it worked this time. Spoke too soon, error is back.

I updated the MBIDs in some of my albums to get them to show up how I want. For example, changed the MBIDs of the "Bob Marley" albums to the one for "Bob Marley & The Wailers" so they would all show up under the same artist. Also removed the extra MBIDs from the Alicia Keys tracks featuring other artists. After a rescan, however, Alicia Keys does not show up under Artists. I can find her albums under the Genre node, but not under Artists. Any ideas?

[braz]

Another question...does the scraper now create a virtual folder in the music source when the artist name doesn't match exactly? For example, I had albums inside a folder for the artist "M.I.A". Note that Windows automatically truncates the ending period. I looked at my music source today and see that there is another folder correctly spelled as "M.I.A.", that contains the same contents as "M.I.A". So I delete the first one, leaving the folder with the correct punctuation. But it appears I deleted the actual music files, the second folder is still visible but says it is "unavailable." What is going on here?

[braz]

I see where the artists/albums that are missing from the Artists view have gone...they are under Compilations now. Is there any way to turn this off? If an album has one track with a featured artist, I don't want the whole album showing up under Compilations and not under the primary Artist name.

Update: I removed the Compilations tag from the albums, that put them back in the Artist view.

[jmarshall]

So all good now?

Note that XBMC does not write to the filesystem unless you tell it to via an Export Library. So any new folders you found were not generated by XBMC.

Cheers,
Jonathan