Kodi Community Forum

Hi everybody. New guy here, and have been recently thrusted into the HTPC world, loving every minute of it. XBMC is a terrific little piece of software.

I'll get down to business.

I have searched the forums with no answers that have been able to help me.

All of my music is organized. Well, I thought it was. I have been a Winamp lover for a long time, and have always made an effort to keep my Music library very organized. I keep all the music metadata up to date, keep every band in their own folder, and strive to have cover art FOR EVERY ALBUM. Oh yeah, there are over 30,000 songs in my playlist.

But I have always been under the impression that cover.jpg was the ideal way to save album art. In, fact I have even gone to lengths of removing imbedded artwork with software like MP3Tag so I can display high res album art during playback.

THE ISSUE:

The problem is, XBMC is currently only showing imbedded stuff. (my organization is not perfect, some folders have imbedded, some have cover.jpg, while some might have folder.jpg)

I have tried this line of code per the wiki in the following path: G:\Avisioncame\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata advancedsettings.xml

<advancedsettings>
<musicthumbs>
<add>cover.jpg</add>
</musicthumbs>
</advancedsettings>

Notice I didn't write <remove>folder.jpg</remove> because I want to keep folder.jpg.

I don't really care WHAT album art displays at this point, as long as SOMETHING is being displayed.

I am using the latest FRODO stable build
Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit

Thank you all in advanced and I will try to keep posted with my updates.

EDIT: I should also note, Scrapers are pretty much out of the question as a solution. I listen to some very obscure stuff and I doubt they would pick it up.

SECOND EDIT:

I may have found the problem I am having. Because I am viewing the music in File view, it is only showing the root folders. For example I might have a Green Day folder, and inside that like 5 more folders for each album, and then cover art inside that.

It looks like my solution is to reorganize ALL of my collection into folders for each individual album, unless there is a known way to replace generic placeholder art.

Having a folder for each album works best. Trying to work around that can become a constant battle.

Does such a workaround exist? Or am I in store for a long project?

I don't know of a workaround for File view. For library view you can depend on scrapers to find album art, or assign it manually for each album, which probably would even be more work.

I think there are tools out there that will automatically organize your music based on tagging, like Mediamonkey.

Thanks, I'll look into mediamonkey. Is it the type of thing that can work with even the most obscure genres?

EDIT: Just looked into, it doesn't really offer any organizing that my Winamp can't already handle.

^I didn't know Winamp could organize folders.. Interesting.

I may be missing the problem here, but it sounds in your initial post second edit that you do have your library correctly organised, i.e. artist folder for Green Day and separate folders for each album underneath it containing the cover art (not sure what you mean by " it is only showing the root folders" though). In this case it may well be that with such a large library XBMC is just taking time to cache the images. It may be worth going into library mode, select thumbnail view for albums and see if given a little time the thumbnails populate. If that works you can then revert to file view.

If you mean only some of your library is structured like Green Day but not the rest there are ways to organise them. For example firstly use the tag -> filename utility in mp3tag to set the filenames to track-artist-album name and then use a file to folder program or script to move them (there are loads if you google it).

I've never used any thumbs called cover.jpg but then I've never had problems with folder.jpg, so don't know if that would create any issue.

Let me give a better example.

I want to view my library by file. So that I can sort by artist, and contained in each artist folder is the album, whether it be one album, or an entire discography.

This is what I am seeing:



^ As you can see above, I am hovered over the artist "Brand New", and yet no cover image is displayed.

__________________________________________________

BUT when I open that (root as I'm calling it) folder I see this:



You can see above that the artwork is there for each album.

I have determined it is pretty obvious; No artwork is showing because there simply isn't any in the "root" folder, but instead, more folders containing the albums and respective artwork.

So it seems my answer is to simply view my music by album in order to see all of the album artwork.

This way to me is sort of sloppy as I am seeing thousands of albums as opposed to just seeing hundreds of artists.

But if you have your artist thumbs (either through scraping or googling) in your root folder they will show as below. Alternatively copy your favourite album cover to the root folder and use that.

(2013-06-11, 19:59)avisioncame Wrote: [ -> ]So it seems my answer is to simply view my music by album in order to see all of the album artwork.

This way to me is sort of sloppy as I am seeing thousands of albums as opposed to just seeing hundreds of artists.

Albums is not the only way. In library mode, you can view artists, once you select artists, you can see their albums.

(2013-06-11, 20:19)WelshPaul Wrote: [ -> ]But if you have your artist thumbs (either through scraping or googling) in your root folder they will show as below. Alternatively copy your favourite album cover to the root folder and use that.

What I was kind of figuring at this point. As I said earlier, Scraping probably isn't the perfect answer for me, but might be worth a try.

It seems that the answer is here, I just have to make a decision on what will work best for me, as it's a little different than what I'm used to compared to Winamp.

I appreciate everyone's input and help, I really love XBMC and I think I have barely started scratching the surface with it.