Under-the-hood changes from 12 to 13?
#1
Hey all,

So I recently installed Gotham clean after moving my settings files from Frodo (i.e. deleting them), and I'm surprised at how... rough Gotham is in many ways. I see that historically new versions of XBMC seem to break compatibility with old plugins (a very Pythonic approach to version upgrades - I'm not bothered by this at all.) I'm just curious about what the nature of these under-the-hood changes are?

A few examples of "roughness" that I suspect may be exposing changes to fundamental parts of XBMC error correction and scraping engine:

1. The music scraper duplicates artists and screws up attribution upon importing a folder into the library. This is the exact same folder that, when added in Frodo, parsed everything absurdly well. I was sort of in shock over how well it worked in Frodo. Now, I have 2 authors with ostensibly the same name ('Beck'), although one may be "Beck " (with a space after it) vs "Beck" or something, albums under the wrong artist (Gorillaz EP under the artist Beck, despite the Gorillaz album itself showing "Gorillaz" as the artist...) etc.

2. Lyrics scraper in Gotham, while ostensibly the same (by name at least: CU LRC Lyrics), fails to find lyrics for ~60% of the songs in my library. This figure was closer to 20% in Frodo. Again, exact same library folder (same id3 tags on the music files, etc.).

I should mention that in both cases I'm using Aeon Nox skin, not Confluence. In Gotham, using Confluence didn't seem to impact any of this at all, but since I didn't use Confluence in Frodo I thought it would be a bad comparison if I didn't try with Aeon Nox from the start.

I want to be super clear that this isn't meant to be a complaint - Frodo is still available, Gotham is in RC1, and this just smells like newly exposed edges as a result of some under-the-hood change to how the application is structured, which will probably make the project more robust in the long term. From a developers standpoint, I'm just interested to hear about the kinds of design changes that have been made in the jump from Frodo to Gotham (the FAQ and changelog don't really highlight anything that jump out at me - they're focused more on features than framework) that might result in breaking some of these connections that were made so easily before.

Or is this just false correlation where changes to the API/structure of the source websites like theaudiodb and whatever lyrics source is used just happened to fall around the same time I upgraded to Gotham?
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#2
There were about 10,000 changes between Frodo and Gotham (completely pulled the number out of my arse, but it's likely order of magnitude).

In particular, the music library was overhauled. Frodo basically ignored musicbrainz identifiers, which meant if they were wrong, you were OK.

Gotham reads them if they're there and uses them to disambiguate. If they're wrong you're in for a world of hurt. Get rid of them if you don't use them.

BTW: Gotham is final, and has already had one bugfix release. Second bugfix release is currently in beta. i.e. it's definitely well past RC1

Jonahtan
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


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#3
(2014-07-13, 00:17)jmarshall Wrote: There were about 10,000 changes between Frodo and Gotham (completely pulled the number out of my arse, but it's likely order of magnitude).

In particular, the music library was overhauled. Frodo basically ignored musicbrainz identifiers, which meant if they were wrong, you were OK.

Gotham reads them if they're there and uses them to disambiguate. If they're wrong you're in for a world of hurt. Get rid of them if you don't use them.

BTW: Gotham is final, and has already had one bugfix release. Second bugfix release is currently in beta. i.e. it's definitely well past RC1

Jonahtan

cool - thanks for the insight. When you say 'musicbrainz identifiers' are these elements in the music file tag or an XBMC setting?

Also - my bad about the state of Gotham. When I say "recently installed"... that's in grad student time units. I did install RC1 so perhaps I should update..
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#4
In the tags.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


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Under-the-hood changes from 12 to 13?0