Kodi Community Forum

(2016-05-19, 11:58)manfeed Wrote: [ -> ]Hi pkscout, thanks for your work in this addon!

I have just installed the new version and I can't get it to work anymore... my log is here...

http://xbmclogs.com/poczd0zsm

AS seems to be working, but in the first two cases at least there is no fanart to download from any of the three sites for the artists in question (Sinitta and Nikki Lane). I didn't check any further, so you might check to make sure there are images to download.

Quote:Another question, I can't find the setting to choose the language of the artist bio

Yup. That's a bug. I must have accidentally deleted that setting when I was moving things around. It should be in the artist bio section of the settings. I'll fix that.

2.0 beta Works for me as a straight replacement, haven't had opportunity to put it through it's paces yet.

Forgot to say thank-you. really is enjoyable.

(2016-05-19, 11:58)manfeed Wrote: [ -> ]Another question, I can't find the setting to choose the language of the artist bio

OK, this will be fixed in the next beta. I'd like to wait to release another beta until I see if there are other bug reports. In the meantime, you can fix this by editing line 27 of the settings.xml file for AS. On that line, remove:

That should make the language selection visible again. BTW, 2.0.0 respects whatever setting you had in 1.8.8, so you only need this if you want to change the language.

(2016-05-20, 00:37)pkscout Wrote: [ -> ]

(2016-05-19, 11:58)manfeed Wrote: [ -> ]Another question, I can't find the setting to choose the language of the artist bio

OK, this will be fixed in the next beta. I'd like to wait to release another beta until I see if there are other bug reports. In the meantime, you can fix this by editing line 27 of the settings.xml file for AS. On that line, remove:

Code:

visible="eq(-1,true)"

That should make the language selection visible again. BTW, 2.0.0 respects whatever setting you had in 1.8.8, so you only need this if you want to change the language.

Thanks now works very well!

I have made intensive checking and I think I know what my problem was... in order to make a clean installation of version 2.0.0. I manually deleted script.artistslideshow folder in addons and in userdata\addon_data. After that I installed the new version from your repo but it didn't work.

However, this time I have only updated the new version over the former one and it worked ok. After that I manually deleted the artists information in userdata\addon_data\script.artistslideshow\ArtistInformation and userdata\addon_data\script.artistslideshow\ArtistSlideshow so as to see if version 2.0 could fetch new data and it seems so

Thanks!

2.0.0 Beta 4 Release

v.2.0.0~beta4
- fix for crash when Musicbrainz server doesn't respond
- fixed an issue where bio language setting wasn't displaying
- fixed an issue with bio and album info not loading on new installs

Thanks to the folks testing. @manfeed, I think I figured out why your brand new install test wasn't working. I thought I had checked with a clean install, but I clearly hadn't, because AS crashed when I tried with a clean install. So I fixed that. I also corrected an issue where bio and album data wouldn't be download on a clean install.

So in 2.0 I take it "1" is highest priority (use first)?

scott s.
.

(2016-05-20, 06:23)scott967 Wrote: [ -> ]So in 2.0 I take it "1" is highest priority (use first)?

Yes. I'll update the wiki page once this comes out of beta.

Can you explain how the musicbrainz web service is used by the Add-on?

(2016-05-20, 09:47)zag Wrote: [ -> ]Can you explain how the musicbrainz web service is used by the Add-on?

Sure. Here's the logic for getting the MusicBrainzID (which I need for fanart.tv for sure, and helps both theaudiodb and htbackdrops return more accruate results).

1- AS asks Kodi for the MBID of the playing artist (or artists) via a JSON call
2- If nothing is returned, then it checks to see if there is a cached MBID on disk
3- If not, then it asks MusicBrainz for a list of artists that match the current artist
4- AS takes that list, starts at the top, and asks for all the albums for that artist
5- It takes that list and compares to the currently playing album, if match found, it writes the MBID out to a cache file
6- if no album match, AS asks for all the songs form an artist
7- It takes that list and compares to the currently playing album, if match found, it writes the MBID out to a cache file
8- If no matches, go back to #3 and try the next artist
9 - eventually AS will give up and write out a blank file, wait 2 weeks, and try again

I do not love this part of the code, but this was the only way I could pretty much guarantee I'd get back the right MBID or no MBID at all. It's messy and somewhat API call intensive for prolific artists (or obscure ones), but it works pretty quickly with popular artists. BTW, I do a song check because if you're listening to a radio stream there is almost never album information.

I'm hoping at some point MBID will be something Kodi scrapes when moving music into the library (or is it doing that now??) Then the only time the alternate code would be needed is for music streams.
I'm open on ideas on how this could be done differently.

(2016-05-20, 19:11)pkscout Wrote: [ -> ]Sure. Here's the logic for getting the MusicBrainzID (which I need for fanart.tv for sure, and helps both theaudiodb and htbackdrops return more accruate results).

1- AS asks Kodi for the MBID of the playing artist (or artists) via a JSON call
2- If nothing is returned, then it checks to see if there is a cached MBID on disk
3- If not, then it asks MusicBrainz for a list of artists that match the current artist
4- AS takes that list, starts at the top, and asks for all the albums for that artist
5- It takes that list and compares to the currently playing album, if match found, it writes the MBID out to a cache file
6- if no album match, AS asks for all the songs form an artist
7- It takes that list and compares to the currently playing album, if match found, it writes the MBID out to a cache file
8- If no matches, go back to #3 and try the next artist
9 - eventually AS will give up and write out a blank file, wait 2 weeks, and try again

I do not love this part of the code, but this was the only way I could pretty much guarantee I'd get back the right MBID or no MBID at all. It's messy and somewhat API call intensive for prolific artists (or obscure ones), but it works pretty quickly with popular artists. BTW, I do a song check because if you're listening to a radio stream there is almost never album information.

I'm hoping at some point MBID will be something Kodi scrapes when moving music into the library (or is it doing that now??) Then the only time the alternate code would be needed is for music streams.
I'm open on ideas on how this could be done differently.

For music in the library, my position would be it should be the responsibility of the user to properly tag the music files with MBID. I wouldn't apply much computing resource in trying to fix what the user didn't or couldn't (or provide a setting switch to not search for MBID for music in the library). That leaves streaming music which I don't see an easy answer for.

scott s.
.

(2016-05-20, 23:16)scott967 Wrote: [ -> ]For music in the library, my position would be it should be the responsibility of the user to properly tag the music files with MBID. I wouldn't apply much computing resource in trying to fix what the user didn't or couldn't (or provide a setting switch to not search for MBID for music in the library). That leaves streaming music which I don't see an easy answer for.

OK, I have updated code that now behaves like this for music in the library:

1- ask Kodi for the MBID
2- if nothing, check and see if there is a MBID file from a previous version of AS
3- if there is no file, return an empty string

For streams AS still tries to find a MBID, although I'm thinking about dropping that. Why? Because with just the artist name you can still get artwork from htbackdrops and artist info from last.fm.

Having said all that, if I go this route, I think I need to change the default settings so that htbackdrops is the image site on by default (right now it's fanart.tv). That way someone who has no MBIDs in their music library will still get back some images. I also need to figure out how to put something in the settings to tell folks that if they enable fanart.tv or theaudiodb that their music files will need MBIDs.

This would be a pretty substantial change, so I'd really like some feedback from other folks on this. The advantage is that this completely eliminates the need to beat on the musicbrainz server to get the ID. And since I still look for the MBID file, folks upgrading don't necessarily have to add anything to their music. The disadvantage is for new users (or new music for existing users) there may be less information available without the MBID.

Yep that sounds like a much better idea. Anyone who wants those kind of things should really use Picard to tag their music.

We are also discussing internally better ways to get the MBID via initial scraping. Currently the universal artist scraper does not store this info in the db.

The musicbrainz service is currently being overrun by kodi and some add-ons at the moment, so we need to do something to help them.

2.0.0 Beta 5 Released

v.2.0.0~beta5
- fix for empty string returned when asking Kodi for Musicbraniz IDs
- removed remote Musicbrainz ID lookup, MusicBrainz ID must now be in Kodi
- changed default to get bio from Kodi and images from htbackdrops

The last thing I'm working on is to get the discography for an artist from Kodi. This is trickier than I thought so if it take much longer I may release 2.0 as is to deal with the API load issues on various services and then release the discography update later.

2.0.0 Beta 6 Released
Fixes a crash when theaudiodb.org returns a null artist result (I had caught two of these before, but I missed one)

At this point it doesn't look like there is any easy way to get the discography back from Kodi (short of doing a direct database call, which I'm not willing to consider), so 2.0.0 is now feature complete. Barring any other bugs, I'll be releasing it to the main repo sometime this week.

Hi pkscout! Having a look at the data collected by AS in userdata\addon_data folder and I'm impressed! Could it be possible to have an option to pass that data to an artist.nfo file in the artists folder? That would be incredible since right now there's no scraper nor any other addon that retrieves so much information about artists as AS!

Another question: from my experience, LastFm is the best place to find artists; I try to get artists information in Spanish whenever possible, but I'd rather have it in English than empty, however if I select Spanish in preferred language in AS settings and that artist doesn't have biography in Spanish in LastFM I get nothing (even if English biography does exist) Would it be possible to fallback to English in that case?

Thanks for your work and your amazing addon!