(2017-10-20, 10:55)DaveBlake Wrote: [ -> ]Scott you are unusual in wanting the 2nd album artist to have the same art as the first, generally such allocation is a bug. Maybe we get alias names impemented properly evetually eh?
(2017-10-20, 10:25)scott967 Wrote: [ -> ]I found that the exported art is not identical to the original jpegs (even if the dimensions are identical) so it isn't as easy as just exporting all the artist art (since I don't really want a derivative art).
Useful to know. I knew that there could be compression, but somehow expected a match if dimensions were the same. Perhaps change is to be expected in the manouvre into cache and back.
OK. Spent a few hours playing around with the test build and my full music source. What I find is the "artist info" folder tree is so useful, I have no reason to screw around with the "art-in-music-foiders" v17 process. Here is what I did, and I think is good for any user with extensive local info and art.
1. I installed 18 test build as portable (not required of course) and copied my v17.4 userdata for music (mymusic60.db, textures13.db and entire thumbnails). Obviously just installing over 17.4 does the same thing.
2. I set my artist info folder in settings.
3. I exported (separate file) all contributors artist.nfo including unscraped with overwrite ON. I did this to populate the artist info tree.
4. With help of a couple utilities, I was able to copy all artist art from my music file library to the artist info folders, necessarily duplicating the art for the alias artists (which now have their own folders in artist info).
5. Then export (separate files) all contributors art to artist info with overwrite OFF (this way I pick up anything I added manually or from scrape).
6. Then deleted all the artist.nfo files from my artist info tree (mainly, so I could scrape the non-album artist contributors). I
think I could just export the "scraped" artist.nfos, but haven't tried that yet. Then I could I think just "scrape all artists" rather than doing it one-at-a-time to pick up the contributors (mainly I have been getting conductors and orchestras this way, and in some cases soloists). (As an aside, if you follow MB style, classical album artist should use album artists containing composer, conductor, and primary performer. Composer is also tagged as artist and composer -- so need to watch out for name string consistency between these two. Same with ensemble or performer/TMCL.)
7. Export (separate files) contributor artist.nfo and art with overwrite OFF including unscraped. The result is a fully populated artist info folder tree. I can then search on <biography></biography> in nfo files to find any to manually add info to.
So this way I don't need to edit my db manually to set artist/album scraped dates, nor export single file except as a backup. I just scan new music, scrape it, export the new info (deltas), and manually complete the empty artist.nfo and album.nfo and add local art as desired.
I think I can then just refresh all artists/albums to pick up my manual edits rather than doing a library import.
Also for other users, just doing scrapes and then exporting to artist info should be simple, easy, and allows integration with cdArt manager, SHS, AS, and skins. I have tons of AS artist extrafanart and bio data that I could incorporate into the artist info.
scott s.
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