Improved allmusic.com scraper (plus a few questions)

huh?

we have a separate discogs scraper. he wants to grab discogs thumbs in the allmusic scraper, which means much longer scraping times.

spiff Wrote:the thumbs, however, you are dead wrong on. we still happily parse amg thumbs in GetAMGArtist and those are added first - so they get the priority.

Ugh, well, I made that assumption based on the fact that both the last.fm or freebase scrapers are only pulling thumbs from htbackdrops as well.. but I just realized they both have errors in them as well (in both scripts they're outputting the thumb results to buffer 7, and they should be outputting to buffer 5). I'll see if I can put a trac in for those too.

spiff Wrote:edit2: just remember, i haven't gotten around to adding scraper settings to music scrapers yet. will do asap

That'd be a great addition!!

Edit: I just realized the freebase scraper was fixed a couple days ago. I've submitted patches for the last.fm scraper, as well as the allmusic scraper (but without my Discogs additions.. just the fixes).

stokedfish Wrote:looks like you guys don't like discogs. why is that? just wondering...

Discogs is a great resource for discography info (obviously, hence the name), but is pretty lacking when it comes to artist bios and other info. Take, for example, Ben Harper, who is a pretty popular artist: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Ben+Harper

Their entire "bio" for Ben Harper consists of his name and his birth date. Then compare that to allmusic.com's: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg...qe5ld0e~T1

Their bio is a comprehensive 6-paragraph history of the artist, along with their birthdate/location, years active as an artist, genres, styles, instruments played, etc. Unfortunately Allmusic's photos are limited to 200px wide, which look pretty awful in XBMC, which is why I modified the Allmusic script to use Discog's photos instead, as Discogs generally has photos 500px wide or more.

delivered on my first promise (urlencoding of buffers);

thanks for the patches!

talisto Wrote:as well as the allmusic scraper (but without my Discogs additions.. just the fixes).

would you consider adding those as well?
i'm sure you're not the only one who thinks discogs.com provides far better artist thumbs compared to allmusic.

in fact, and i have no clue if it would be possible, adding a fallback to discogs for artist/album info would be nice too when they're not listed at allmusic.

sure it would increase scraper times, but in the end it's the results that count.
and manually having to add .nfo files for all the failed items would be a lot more time consuming.

just some thoughts....

ronie Wrote:would you consider adding those as well?
i'm sure you're not the only one who thinks discogs.com provides far better artist thumbs compared to allmusic.

I think it's better to add this once spiff has implemented settings for the music scrapers, rather than forcing it now. There may be quite a number of people who (for example) have their own thumbnails as folder.jpg's in their artists folder and don't want or need the extra processing from scraping another page, especially when they're already scraping htbackdrops as well. Though, with that said, the htbackdrops scraping should probably be an optional setting as well, eventually.

spiff Wrote:thanks for the patches!

Glad to finally be able to help out with XBMC in some way! Thanks for implementing the url encoding!

delivered on my second promise (music scraper settings) in r22934

:cool:Nice, been waiting for this one.