[zag]

Just a thread for the album information endless loop bug that has been around a long time.

Someone just mentioned it on github and Razzeee might be able to take a look so I thought discussion on here might help.

When you go to the album list, call the context menu on an album and select "Album information" you'll end up with an endless loop when the album can not be found.
It will present you with the album title dialog to change the name, followed by the artist name dialog to change the name, followed by the album title dialog, etc. Trying to quickly press the cancel button in between will just give you the same dialog again. No button on the remote (all I have) allows you to break the cycle (return, exit, colour for different Kodi section, etc.). The only way is to clear the name of the artist completely. This finally gives you the "Album not found" error/notification.

Its easy to replicate, just go to an unknown Album >> Album information and you end up in the endless loop.

[Forage]

Some more info.

A simple musicdb to replicate the problem: http://beta.scratchingmyitch.com/MyMusic54.db.zip
A debug log: http://sprunge.us/eOjL

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to the Music library
   
2. Click on "Albums"
   
3. Select the only available album
   
4. Call the album context menu ("Option" key on remote, right mouse button, etc)
   
5. Select "Album information"
   

Result:

1. The 'Searching' dialog will appear shortly
   
2. The dialog to alter the album name will appear
   
3. The 'Searching' dialog will appear shortly
   
4. The dialog to alter the artist name will appear
   
5. [go back to step 1]
   

The only way to stop the cycle is to clear either the album or artist name completely.

Let me know if you need any more information.

[un1versal]

Not endless loop you can get out by not trying to get information repeatedly and usually its a unknown album due to bad tagging.

The issue could be handled better by offering you a list of choices like TMDb and TVDB do, but that means someone would have to fix the this properly and not in some workaround.

[Forage]

Not endless loop you can get out by not trying to get information repeatedly

You don't get a chance not to do it once you start it. You can only press "done" in the name dialogs which results in a search attempt again and hitting cancel in the search dialog give you a name dialog again.

and usually its a unknown album due to bad tagging.

My tags are all perfect. It has an album and artist name in the dialogs to begin with, otherwise there wouldn't be a need to clear it to get out of the loop. There will always be cases where no info will be found, no matter how good/complete you filled the tags.

The issue could be handled better by offering you a list of choices like TMDb and TVDB do, but that means someone would have to fix the this properly and not in some workaround.

Who suggested a work-around? ;-)

[un1versal]

I always, but I MEAN always managed to get out of that, only you must not know how to use back button.

workaround https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/8057

[evilhamster]

Universal:
Why do you consider this as a workaround and not a proper fix?

The way it currently works, is that if the scraper finds something with a good enough score it will use that information. If it finds somethings that don't have good enough score it will give the user an option to select which item is the correct one. Is this what you are referring to with regards to TMDB/TVDB?

What that pull request does is basically to not refresh an album when selecting "Album Information" but rather only scrape an album if the user selects "refresh". This enables an user to view information about an album that the scraper source does not know about and also for example change the cover for that album. I also think it is the correct behavior to show information if "Album Information" is selected and not force an update of that object first (if it hasn't already been scraped). I did consider to do try one scrape on "album information", but only enter the loop if "refresh" was selected, but I decided I liked the idea of only doing a scrape if refresh was selected.

Forage:
Does this variant make sense to you? Can you think of any other way you would like it to work?

[un1versal]

Universal:
Why do you consider this as a workaround and not a proper fix?

The way it currently works, is that if the scraper finds something with a good enough score it will use that information. If it finds somethings that don't have good enough score it will give the user an option to select which item is the correct one. Is this what you are referring to with regards to TMDB/TVDB?

Workaround because what you said after (what tvdb and tmdb does never happens in Music.

So it is a workaround to stop the "loop" which you can escape anyway with backspace btw, but you still end up with unknown something and are never ever in no way presented with a list of possible candidates even if results exist direct from the musicbrainz site are right. This logic doesn't exist and would be a proper fix imo.

The main reason I state that is because the user claimed categorically that the tags are perfect and because I come across this issue and there are indeed results for the album in question in musicbrainz for instance. yet irrespective of good tags, good naming this happens anyway and no option offered and will continue to happen even with this patch.

Hence workaround.

I mean its better than nothing, but still not really a proper fix for the root issue whatever that is, IDK..

[evilhamster]

Workaround because what you said after (what tvdb and tmdb does never happens in Music.

So it is a workaround to stop the "loop" which you can escape anyway with backspace btw, but you still end up with unknown something and are never ever in no way presented with a list of possible candidates even if results exist direct from the musicbrainz site are right. This logic doesn't exist and would be a proper fix imo.

The main reason I state that is because the user claimed categorically that the tags are perfect and because I come across this issue and there are indeed results for the album in question in musicbrainz for instance. yet irrespective of good tags, good naming this happens anyway and no option offered and will continue to happen even with this patch.

Hence workaround.

I mean its better than nothing, but still not really a proper fix for the root issue whatever that is, IDK..

Well it actually does, lets take a real world example on what happens using the universal album scraper.

Artist: Fake, Album: Fake
The scraper generates the following search string towards musicbrainz:
http://search.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/relea...Fake%22%29

It returns a lot of results, but no results are considered good enough by the scraper so the you are prompted with a list of results to select from.

But most times when the scraper can't find anything, it's because musicbrainz doesn't find anything and the result is empty. For example:

Artist: Neil Young, Album: My Selection
The scraper generates the following search string towards musicbrainz:
http://search.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/relea...n%22%20AND

Then you get the loop, that you will need to enter something that the scraper actually finds or jump out of.

Do you have any examples where it should find some results but it doesn't?

The main point of this is to avoid the loop on album information, even after this pr you can still get the loop but only when doing a refresh (since then it actually makes sense to be able to search multiple times).

[Forage]

I always, but I MEAN always managed to get out of that, only you must not know how to use back button.

I'm a bit surprised by the tone of your response and the assumptions being made on which it is apparently based.

I come across an issue while testing a change, so I report it. Since I run into it I assume other will do so too. Since the way out isn't obvious at all I am of the opinion that it would be better for Kodi to have it fixed in one way or another. That's it.

The way I read your response is: here comes another one bitching about something irrelevant, get over it.

Well guess what: I really don't care if it gets fixed or not, I don't use Kodi to play music to begin with. Others, on the other hand, might. I'm at least not the first to run into it, judged by the look of it. Me testing and reporting is not just for me, it's for other users as well. The music library changes seemed invasive, so I was interested to try it out.

The only way I have to navigate Kodi is a TV remote. I'm on a Raspbarry Pi and I'm using Milhouse's builds. Trust me, I pressed the back button. It does nothing for me but clear the name dialogs. By reading the initial post completely you would have known already. If it was unclear from that one you could have bothered to ask instead of insinuating I'm an idiot by not trying or not managing to press a button.

So it is a workaround to stop the "loop" which you can escape anyway with backspace btw, ...

The main reason I state that is because the user claimed categorically that the tags are perfect and because I come across this issue and there are indeed results for the album in question in musicbrainz for instance. yet irrespective of good tags, good naming this happens anyway and no option offered and will continue to happen even with this patch.

In this particular situation it's a various artist album. Tracks have proper titles, proper album name, the artist field have individual names applicable to the track and the album artist field is set to "VA", as all my various artist album are. The latter is what Kodi picks up. Even though MusicBrainz has the album, Kodi is not able to find the combination of what I assume is album and album artist name.
The only thing my tags don't have is MusicBrainz IDs for track, artist nor album.

All the information I ever need was already retrieved solely from the tags (art, genre, year, etc.). There would be nothing relevant for me to pull off the internet if I was to play music in Kodi.

Based on this I say:

• The initial online search needs improvement to deal with just an album title
  
• The attempt to find something should give up at some point automagically or the user should be offered an option.
  

[un1versal]

I'm a bit surprised by the tone of your response and the assumptions being made on which it is apparently based.

I come across an issue while testing a change, so I report it. Since I run into it I assume other will do so too. Since the way out isn't obvious at all I am of the opinion that it would be better for Kodi to have it fixed in one way or another. That's it.

The way I read your response is: here comes another one bitching about something irrelevant, get over it.

Not at all, We are talking about the same issue and you gave your experience and I gave mine, both distinct.
OK maybe I could have worded that better but its too late for that, point is to focus on the issue and not on WWIII, is irrespective if its easy or difficult, obvious or not obvious to get out of this

Things could be handled better a feeling I think we all share here so lets stay focused on the issue and not on the negative.

The PR above will fix the immediate issue of the loop but it wont fix what you and I also described. See below.

In this particular situation it's a various artist album. Tracks have proper titles, proper album name, the artist field have individual names applicable to the track and the album artist field is set to "VA", as all my various artist album are. The latter is what Kodi picks up. Even though MusicBrainz has the album, Kodi is not able to find the combination of what I assume is album and album artist name.
The only thing my tags don't have is MusicBrainz IDs for track, artist nor album.

All the information I ever need was already retrieved solely from the tags (art, genre, year, etc.). There would be nothing relevant for me to pull off the internet if I was to play music in Kodi.

Based on this I say:

• The initial online search needs improvement to deal with just an album title
  
• The attempt to find something should give up at some point automagically or the user should be offered an option.
  

Yep This is the core issue, and that's the real problem which the current perceived logic seems so different from TV and Movies and in comparison in my experience its 100 times more work to get albums properly added and populated with art from online databases into Kodi library then Video files, its like day and night here and to me this is why this PR is a workaround and Im glad Im not the only one that feels this logic needs improving,we only been waiting 8 years for this to catch up.

But Hey the PR by evilhamster aka notspiff aka cptspiff aka ironic_monkey aka akva2 is a long way overdue, and for that thank you.

[zag]

evilhamster != spiff

But I get your point, music definitly needs to move towards the same processes as tvshows/video in the long term

[whitebelly]

The endless loop is a problem for me because the required back button is not on my remote, I have to go get my keyboard and hook it up to back out of the window. Then I finally discovered if you blank out the entry, it will force an error that returns you to the artist screen. A workaround to the problem but at least its simple.

I'd prefer to at least see a choice on that dialog window for manual entry, where you could type in bio (and other) information directly, and then use the existing gui to add local art if desired.

Music is inherently different than video, and I think a lot harder to make 'easy' with reliable scraping. Similarly named artists and albums are only part of the problem, there are also different tagging approaches and philosophies. I think XBMC/KODI tied its own hands somewhat when deciding to use the directory structure for artists, something that should not be needed in a database driven system and makes improvements more difficult, IMHO.

With all that said, its still by go to music playing interface for a number of reasons, and I'd say it is quite good for that purpose if you manage the info from the start.

[un1versal]

evilhamster != spiff

But I get your point, music definitly needs to move towards the same processes as tvshows/video in the long term

I got confused since one of the spiff's alias is also confused_hamster so I thought this was yet another

[Forage]

A part of the problem is the on-screen keyboard if you ask me. Instead of only functioning as a way to input text it also functions as the activator of the action. It should allow me to input text for a different dialog, were this dialog offers me the option to either continue or stop.
The current behaviour of the keyboard, or actually the way it's being used, got me in similar loop-like behaviour in other places of Kodi (can't recall where it was any more).

A quick idea to improve online search of tracks:
Use calculate the AcousticID to determine the album and artist based on the music instead of the tags.
Saving performance could be done with methods like only using one track if this track is already determined to be part of a set of more tracks based on the album tag.
Various artist albums not credited to a single artist will always be problematic though.

[zag]

A quick idea to improve online search of tracks:
Use calculate the AcousticID to determine the album and artist based on the music instead of the tags.
Saving performance could be done with methods like only using one track if this track is already determined to be part of a set of more tracks based on the album tag.
Various artist albums not credited to a single artist will always be problematic though.

Bit off topic, but yes I considered this years ago as well. File hashing, or acousiID stuff would be the ultimate way of fingerprinting data for scanning in.

Its the next logical step for scrapers, but would take some work on the metadata side to be able to handle the volume of requests.

One for the future I think