[ladiferencia]

Quick Question:

I have my music organized by albums where each folder holds an album and the folder name is <Album> - <Artist>. Where I am supposed to put the artist fanart and how should it be named so that it would be picked up in a scan.

Also, is there a good Media Manager that would help with this. I already use one for videos but not for music. I know how to add artist fanart from within xbmc but I want to have the files locally in my music directory so that I can re-scan in case of a re-install.

I have looked in the forum and the Wiki without success. Any help appreciated. Thanks.

[jmarshall]

The only thing XBMC supports for local artist fanart is:

<artist>/<album>/<songs>

The rules are:

1. We look at the common parent folder of all the artists' albums (so generally this is the parent of each of the album folders.)
2. In the case of a single album, we look at the parent of the album folder.

So in both cases, the above layout works.

I'm fairly certain this is detailed in the wiki. Please take another look and confirm.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[ladiferencia]

Thanks for your prompt reply. I see that the wiki has some info about it. The way you explained it is much clearer though. I still have a small doubt that I would like to clear before I re-structure my music directory. The parent folder for albums should be <artist> or <album artist>. For me album artist makes the most sense because in the case of compilations there is one album with many artists but only one 'Album Artist'. That means less 'Artist' parent folders and a more consolidated folder structure. If I go by the 'Artist' route instead, one compilation album would be effectively divided into many folders each with the songs of a specific artist that contributed to the compilation. Then I wouldn't know where to put the <Album>.tbn because there would be multiple folders for a single album and when I'm browsing the albums which fanart would it show from the many different artists associated with the album.

The question again is: does artist fanart go by artist or by album artist or does it just ignore the tags and goes by folder structure and naming.

I'm guessing it's the latter but I just wanna be sure before I move my files.

:confused2:

[steshell]

My music folder structure is Album Artist/Album with fanart.jpg in each Album Artist folder.

For compilations I create Album Artists i.e Various Soul, Various Pop, Various Motown and put a generic fanart.jpg within each folder.

I don't know if this is the best or correct way but it works for me.


Steve

[buddiemac]

I have two systems running XBMC. One is Linux Lucid and the other is a Win7. Both are XBMC Dharma and Skin is transparency.

I exported my music library from the Linux system and imported into the Win 7 system. The Winy7 systems handles fan art as I would expect and how defined in the wiki pages. But the Linux system does not display fan art for compilations.

Example: A album whose album artist tag is Rolling Stones and where a song's artist tag as "rolling stones / Mick Jagger / Keith Richards"

The Win7 systems uses the first artist "rolling stones" to display the fan art where the Linux system displays no fan art for compilations.

When compilation is turned on, all artists do display when sorting by artist and their associated fan art is displayed in both system. This is at the artist level of viewing and not at the album not song level.

What can I look at to have the fan art display for compilation songs in Linux?

Any help is appreciated