Upgrade to XBMC 13 has binned my fanart
#16
Hey, Ears, you're not alone! I'm having the same problem too since the move to Gotham and it's driving me crazy! I even blew out my userdata folder to make sure nothing left over from Frodo was affecting things and it still does it. I'm using Windows 7 x64 on an Intel NUC DC3217IYE, with SMB shares on a Windows 8.1 x64 machine (no username or passwords). Like you, I get blank fanart too after a library scan. I can hit the Info button on an artist and then Get Fanart, but with 566 artists, that would take forever! I have all three Fanart Sources selected in Universal Artist Scraper.

If it would help, I can delete the music database, turn on verbose debugging and post the debug.log.
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#17
OK then here's some weird progress.

The title of this thread is wrong. The upgrade to 13 hasn't broken fanart. It didn't work before that. In the back of my mind I was sure I'd had this before and fixed it and after a bit of investigation I've got a really weird conclusion.

Here's the bottom line.

If I create a completely new XBMC Windows profile and use the Ace theme, I can scan my library and it will automatically, and correctly download and display artist fanart.

If I do exactly the same as above but use either the default Confluence skin, or Transparency (I haven't tried any others) the fanart does not download and weird entries are placed in the database as per earlier in this thread.

Once the music library update has run using the Ace the fanart is displayed in Confluence.

Once the music lilbrary update has run using Confluence the fanart is not displayed in Ace (unsurprising as the database entries for fanart are incorrect)

If I start a music library update using Ace, then switch to Transparency half way through, fanart entries continue to be stored correctly in the database.

TV and Movie fanart is stored and displayed correctly regardless of the skin.

To reiterate - I no longer believe that this is an issue with 13. More likely was an issue somewhere between 10-12. I remember some time ago, maybe when upgrading to 12, realising that fanart only worked in Ace so stuck with it. When I upgraded to 13 Ace wasn't listed as compatible so I switched back to Transparency, then tested further with Confluence.

Thanks Kevin for your post, I thought it was only me and couldn't work out what was going on. Hopefully this will shed more light on it.
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#18
AFAIK, Ace has an "update library" menu item that simply issues "UpdateLibrary(music)" otherwise if you use the context menu on the music source "Scan item to library" that is hard-coded in XBMC and not under skin control at all.

scott s.
.
maintainer of skin  Aeon MQ5 mods for post-Gotham Kodi releases:
Matrix see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Matrix release thread
Nexus see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Nexus release thread
Aeon MQ 5 skin and addon repo 11.1.0
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#19
Well I used 'Scan item to library' from the files page and can produce different behaviour from different skins. One writes a hyperlink to artist fanart in the MySQL database, the other writes an SMB path to a server on the local network where the fanart hyperlink should be.

I've never seen the code, but it seems to me that there's some kind of call to something in the environment that is returning something unexpected. It never happens with TV / movies, but consistently happens in music with specific skins, on both Windows and OpenELEC on the Pi. The fact that it happens on the Pi, which is such a 'closed' environment with far fewer configuration variables, suggests that this is not just isolated to me, there are just a set of circumstances that mean other users haven't noticed or triggered it. Yet.

I now have a workaround that works for me. I don't have an ideal perfect skin in XBMC, Ace is as inoffensive as any other 2 or 3, so I'm happy to continue with it and don't need any further help. I've provided as much information as I can, I'll provide more if you ask for it.

It's up to the development team as to whether they think it's worth looking into. As a software developer myself, I know from experience that these niggles don't go away, and can come back one day and bite you in a big way.
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#20
I found a solution on my end as well, although mine has to do with folder structure. Right now I'm using the Metropolis skin. Like some other skins, it relies on Artwork Downloader, so that may be part of the issue you're seeing with different skins. I've always organized my music this way:

Music/Artist - Album (Year)

A bunch of the artists in my collection don't have thumbs available at the usual sources, so I was reading up on how to manually add thumbs locally. The way it works, you need to create an artist folder and place the artist pic (named folder.jpg, just like album thumbs) in that folder. It turns out that this is how most folks organize their music library:

Music/Artist/Year - Album

I created a few artist folders, placed the folder.jpg and album folders inside that directory, ran a library scan and *poof* fanart downloads and displays properly now in XBMC Gotham! This was never an issue before, but I'm willing to chalk it up to bad (or at least improper) folder structure. It's kind of annoying to have to reorganize nearly 1500 folders, but I'm also taking this opportunity to manually choose my favorite folder.jpg and fanart.jpg files for each artist. Yea, a new project! Wink
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#21
Thanks that's really helpful - my music is also organised where each album has its own folder from the root of my albums share, I don't have an artist -> albums hierarchy.

Maybe it needs to be explicit that this structure appears not to be supported?
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#22
No. Your structure is just fine. Just obviously you can't have local artwork under that scenario (i.e. folder.jpg in the artist folder) as there's no artist folder to pop it in.

Scraped fanart will still work just fine.
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#23
Sorry - it doesn't. I didn't have any local images at all, started with just audio files.

I've now rearranged my audio collection to be artist -> album based so, our of interest, I'll create a new userdata / SQL database and try scanning in afresh again in the scenario that didn't work before and report back.
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#24
AFAIK, MusicInfoScanner will read music file tags to find the first album artist. It will then look in the parent folder and assign any fanart.jpg and/or folder.jpg as the fanart and thumb for that album artist, and also look for an artist.nfo. It will then call scraper and use data from artist.nfo if found or go online with assigned artist scraper if not.

scott s.
.
maintainer of skin  Aeon MQ5 mods for post-Gotham Kodi releases:
Matrix see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Matrix release thread
Nexus see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Nexus release thread
Aeon MQ 5 skin and addon repo 11.1.0
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#25
Theory and practice often differ significantly.

I've just created a new userdata folder, stuck with the default Confluence skin and the only setting I've changed is 'download extra info during library updates' option in music library settings.

Copied in my advancedsettings, but specified a new, as yet uncreated music database.

Then scanned in my albums folder - which is now in the hierarchical artist -> album structure.

Fanart was correctly downloaded and stored in the database.

This confirms
  • music scrapers used by the Confluence and Transparency skin do not correctly store links to fanart in the database for the artist - album (one folder for each album in the root of the share) flat folder structure
  • The Ace skin does correctly store fanart hyperlinks in the database regardless of the albums folder structure
  • The Confluence and Transparency skins do correctly store hyperlinks to fanart in the database if the album folder structure is hierarchical artist -> album (so does Ace)
  • All skins correctly store hyperlinks to fanart for compliation albums, regardless of the folder structure

As far as I have tested (and I have tested fairly comprehensively) this behaviour is unavoidable and can be repeated by following the steps outlined above and in earlier posts in this thread. Thanks KevinSartori for posting what you found.
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#26
Thanks for doing the leg work on this, ears!

Since the switch to Gotham, I've also switched skins. Because of this, I can confirm that when I was using a flat folder structure:

Music/Artist - Album (Year)/

fanart didn't display with either Amber or Metropolis.
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