what is going on with the music library?

[MrCreosote]

i figured out that i needed to change the scraper from allmusic to last.fm to download any extra information about music at all, i switched automated scan on and it spent literally hours (3 or 4) downloading extra data, but there is barely anything there apart from one small picture for each artist. it's not even got album artwork for a lot of the albums, even really well known ones. what was it downloading all that time? the music library used to be really cool.

[BuZz]

http://redmine.exotica.org.uk/issues/206

[MrCreosote]

like i said, i i figured out that i needed to change the scraper to last.fm, cos i knew that the allmusic scraper is broken, what i was wondering is what exactly was it downloading for those 3 or 4 hours it said "downloading artist information" with a progress bar in the top right of the screen?

[BuZz]

no idea. lastfm is broken too I should think. most of our scrapers are broken.

you need to post a debug log if you expect anyone to be able to answer - http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... p?f=6&t=65

that said, I have no plans to fix up any of the old broken scrapers.

[byron]

@ BuZz...I've spent the last couple of days trying to split the music scrapers into albums and artists, and port the universal music scrapers. I am making progress, however I was wondering if it's possible to grab a metadata add-on from SettingsContent.cpp the way that weather is set up to use a weather plugin? I've been racking my brain on this because as you know it would be much easier to access the scrapers from addon.xml than to have to write all of the "Get Setting" functions and adding strings etc...aside from that working, it's going to take me a good while to wrap it up

[BuZz]

not 100% sure what you mean - you mean to choose a different scraper from the interface ?

Unfortunately I don't intend to spend any time on this, as I'm working on real addons support. I don't want to spend any more time on fixing up scrapers etc.

[byron]

Sort of. So Far Ive gone in and tried to make xbmc call up the music and album scrapers from their own sub-folders in system/scrapers/music. I figured I'd try to make system/scrapers/music/albums/common/recources...(same for artists) in an attempt to mimic a metadata addon to get all of the info from the metadata folder and point xbmc to the other folders from SettingsCategory.cpp (not SettingsContent, sorry), or from <includes/common.../> in the actual scraper xml's.

If you wouldn't mind taking a second to look, I will post a diff of what I'm attempting but yes, would it be possible to directly access the metadata scraper folder from SettingsContent to access the info? At that point I could just put the addons in the album or music folders and I think it would work maybe...

[BuZz]

still not sure exactly what you are trying to achieve, but feel free to post a diff and I'll have a quick look.

[byron]

Okay, new to this...what do I post? The patch file from release? can you please provide a link for the quickest learning curve to make a diff?

[BuZz]

http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/Tor ... patch.html

and then post the patchfile to pastebin or similar.

[byron]

Thanks, here's the diff...

http://www.xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=54778

be gentle, it's my first stab at any cpp coding

[BuZz]

ok - i see what you are doing, separating the music scraper out to artist/album scrapers. looks reasonable, although I must mention I am not keen to include any changes like this right now as it conflicts with the current direction of development moving to addon support.

[byron]

Correct. So would you suggest I stop what I'm doing then?

[BuZz]

well, that's up to you. It can be surely a useful exercise in learning the code as a starter. Also, if it was completed and fully tested/working with up to date scrapers, and the addons stuff was still months away, there might be a better argument to include it (also if you were happy to maintain the code).

[byron]

10-4...It sounds as if integration for addons is close then, that's good news! Perhaps I'll just wait until you move forward with that and then try to straighten out the music scrapers if they need it. I don't have a problem maintaining them... I can figure out how to call in the metadata addons pending your changes if it's even necessary. In the meantime I'll keep toying around with my idea and post any further questions in development.

[MrCreosote]

are there any addons that will give me a similar effect to how the music library used to be, ie scan my shared music folder and let me browse it with lots of artwork and information about artists and albums?

[byron]

All of the scrapers for mainline are "metadata" addons and don't offer any viewing windows afaik. Trust me I'm aware of what you're experiencing which is why I started trying to adapt them...that being said, as of a few days ago I was able to scan and complete all my music info in frodo so they are working...I just need to figure out how to make xbmc4xbox utilize the info from the metadata addon folders. I'm making progress, but in the meantime try scanning with last fm (it was pulling some info for me on the xbox), and also try using an id3 tag editor and nfo builder to get info straight before scanning.

[BuZz]

or write some new scrapers / fix up existing scrapers

[MrCreosote]

cool, thanks.
thing is i do use a metadata editor on all my music, it's the first thing i do when i get new music before i put it in my music folder, that's why 99% of it is correct. the couple of things that are wrong in the xbox music library are things that were wrong when i initially got the albums and that i corrected before adding them to my music folder.
what i was wondering is what different kinds of metadata does xbmc4xbox read, eg ID3, ID3v1, v2 etc for it to be finding this other layer of uncorrected information that my other media players are overlooking and getting their information from the tags that i have manually corrected?

EDIT: never mind, i found the advanced settings in my metadata editor

[byron]

Glad you got it figured out, but I don't think we're talking about the same metadata folder. I'm talking about:

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Ad ... 8albums%29

which is a metadata addon used to access the folder that I think that you're describing. Okay so right now xbmc4xbox is using one xml file/scraper and then a "common" folder for the settings. Mainline is using these addons instead...individually they have a separate language and resource folder like every other addon. In frodo it just accesses all of the data it needs from the metadata folder addon.xml ie metadata.album.universal, whereas like I stated above...we are doing this. Been working on a way to make it more like upstream if you will, and in need of a little help if any of you understand cpp...

http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... f=9&t=1710