Req Album and Artist Information access
#1
Hi,

Could you please consider for V14 or onwards a new swtich in music settings to enable / disable automatic scanning for album or artist information or not.

If the switch was to be enabled, then when pressing i on either an ablum or atist then it should automatically execute the scan or it disabled then it should bypass the scan and show the artist or album page.

The problem here is that you can enter an infinite loop if the currently assigned scraper cannot find either the album or artist depending which info is attempting to be accessed. This means you can never actually get to the album or artist information unless a successful scan is executed.

I believe there are solutions for this in certain skins but if if could be introduced into the main solution as a switch or even a solution that if the scan fails then it still continues to the relevant page.

This should not affect the 'refresh' option on the actual artist or album information page but just the process that is initiated when pressing i on an album or artst to remove this infinite loop that happens on scrap failures.

Thanks

Mike.
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#2
^This is a known problem. Not sure where it stands, I thought it was being looked at.

You can get out of the loop with the ESC button, but you still can't get to the Info page for artists that won't scan. Not everyone has an ESC button programmed on their remote, so it can be frustrating when you are stuck and have to go connect the keyboard to get out.

I think the most straightforward solution would be to always go straight to the Artist Info display when you press the I button or select "Artist Info" from the context menu, even if there is no artist information. Then, only have it scan if you select "REFRESH".
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#3
(2014-07-11, 14:08)whitebelly Wrote: Not everyone has an ESC button programmed on their remote, so it can be frustrating when you are stuck and have to go connect the keyboard to get out.

If you delete the text using the onscreen keyboard, and then hit enter (effectively with no album title) that will also get you out of the loop.

There is always the option of creating *.nfo files for artists/albums that won't scan but I appreciate that not everyone can/wants to do that.
Learning Linux the hard way !!
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#4
Hi Black_eagle. This still seems to happen sometimes even when an artist .nfo exist so perhaps there's an issue in XBMC with the ordering of checks i.e. it executes the automatic artist search before looking for a .nfo?

I'm trying to get the music side better and looking into using artist.nfo and album.nfo and have with other users help obtained / updated .mtes for Mp3tag that builds both of these based on the files you have. Just a shame that a music version of something like Ember does not exist to be able to build full & complete .nfos for music.

Mike.
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#5
Ummm.....Tend to agree with you about a third party music manager. There is something available for windows I think, and various people are at various stages of development with other tools/OS's but I don't think any of them have been released yet Sad

On the scraper side, with Gotham, it's perfectly possible to select the 'local info only' scraper when setting the content, so XBMC never looks online for any information.

Whilst I haven't had may problems scraping artists/albums, as most of my stuff is quite mainstream, there has still been the odd issue with artists or albums not being found. What I've done in this case (and I don't recommend this method at all unless you are very sure you know what you are doing) is scrape the artist as someone who is readily available to the scraper but who I haven't got an album for, and then edit the MySQL database directly to alter the artist/album names and biography back to what I want.

It's a nasty hack I know and I guess for the vast majority of users who just want XBMC to 'work' it's a no-no. It's also a bit of a faff to do as you can easily get the art mixed up. I persevere though because I have spent literally hours and hours getting my movie library to look spot on and now I want the music library to look just as cool.
Learning Linux the hard way !!
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#6
I've resorted to hacking via the music library import/export.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1614132
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=166228

This can be extended to include bio information. Basically you export the library to single file, edit with your new/changed information, then import.
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#7
Yeah, that's a cleaner solution really, as you're unlikely to bork up the db doing it that way. I didn't realise that the import function appended to the db rather than overwrite. I expected import to do just that, and overwrite the music library with the imported information. The fact that it doesn't is good to know, and I'll probably use your solution in the future rather than my original method.

Cheers for that Smile

Actually, all it needs to do, IMHO, is if there is no data to scrape, kick you to a dialog box with something like "Tried to scrape artist/album blahblah but no data found. Do you want to add this artist/album to the database or edit the name?" Two option buttons, add and edit.

Could also maybe add an option in the scraper settings to add artist even if no data found online. That way, if someone knows a lot of their stuff is not scrapable, they can set XBMC to create the db entries anyway, rather than answer 'add' lots of times.

I don't know much python at all (yet), but for someone with the right skillset, I don't think it would be too difficult to implement.
Learning Linux the hard way !!
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#8
(2014-07-17, 13:54)black_eagle Wrote: I didn't realise that the import function appended to the db rather than overwrite.

Just to clarify....It will overwrite any tags you include. If you include a null tag, it will delete what is in the db. If will leave alone any tags you don't include.
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#9
@whitebelly, I've looked into your full export / import solution and am now concerned about the actual state of my music db. If I go into Music -> artists the top banner states I have 1014 artists. I then went to settings -> music > export library, I choose single file and then a location but then upon opening the file with notepad+++ and searching for <name> it only finds 118 entries, basically only around 10% of my artists seemed to have been output in the export?

Any ideas / suggestions? I've had to re-build my library several times since going to gotham and I hope I don't need to do it yet again?
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#10
For the not being able to escape from the artist search bug, please submit a trac report with a log.

Its well known but I don't think anyone has actually reported it officially yet.

You can get out of it by deleting the text and pressing ok, but thats not a final solution.
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