[kraqh3d]

jmarshall,

i had thought about that. if you search for all songs by an artist and comare the paths, you can derive some root artist path. the question is what to do when the artist exists in two places.

in my personal case, i have both a "main library" and a "new music" location. each of which is organized path wise as smb://server/music/<library|new>/artist/album/song.mp3. in this case, the root artist path for every artist which exist in both my main library and my new music is the share point smb://server/music/.

in this case, i happen to have both locations off a common share because im using symlinks to make them available that way. if i had two share points, then the base path would be smb://server.

[jmarshall]

The code to determine root artist path is CMusicDatabase::GetArtistPath(). Whether or not it can be improved is up for debate

[nuzecast]

I just created a script that copies /music/artist/Album1/Folder.jpg to /music/artist, deleted the music library and scanned from scratch. Artist thumbs did not get scanned automatically. So manually selected 'Set artist thumb' and chose 'Local copy' for each artist. 177 artists later and my music library now looks pretty nice in Artist view

It would be great if artist/Folder.jpg got scanned automatically though...

Would it be possible to share that script?

I find the allmusic thumbs not all that attractive, so I'd like to somehow automate the creation of an artist folder.jpg like you have.

With over 1000 artists in my database it'll take some time to choose the new thumbnail so I too wish XBMC would use the artist folder.jpg it if it exists.

Thanks
Randy

[SandmanCL]

Here's the script I used for this. Not the most fancy thing in the world but it gets it done.

The snippet of code is perl, not php. But wrapping with PHP gives pretty syntax highlighting

The script is indended to run inside a music/ folder organized as follows:

Artist 1/Album 1
Artist 1/Album 2
Artist 2/Album 1

etc.

If you have a windows box this most likely won't work. if you happen to have perl installed, however, you most likely know what to change

The script goes through each artist and creates a hard link(*) of Folder.jpg from the first album down to the artist directory.

PHP Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

@dirs = split/\n/,`ls -1`; # use 'dir' instead of 'ls -1' in windows

foreach $dir (@dirs) {
  print "$dir\n";
  chdir("$dir");
  $name = (split/\n/,`ls */Folder.jpg`)[0]; # use 'dir' instead of 'ls' in Windows
  system("ln -f \"$name\" Folder.jpg"); # use 'copy' instead of 'ln -f' in windows
  chdir(".."); 
} 


(*) hard link = unix speak... essentially a copy but it doesn't take up extra disk space