Hi all,
I have my entire movie collection up to scratch so now I'm moving on to my music collection.
I currently use a program called Tag And Rename, and all my albums (960 of them) have a high quality album art, together with all correct mp3 tags (ID3) for artist, album artist, album, year, genre, label, track no's etc.
Now I would love to be able to go through and add artist thumbs and fanart to all of them but that will take ages manually.
Are there anyways to scrape the extras like fanart etc for my files, but preserve the tags and album art that I have already set?
First, please note XBMC does NOT contain any tag editing facilities. The way it handles the media files is strictly read-only. Thus you can't "mess up" your stuff by scanning it with XBMC.
Very recently, the AllMusic scraper has been updated & improved. It now grabs a smattering of info from different sources and will grab artist thumbs from HTBackdrops. You will need the most recent SVN build you can find to make sure you get this.
Then, what you want to do is check your settings.
Settings > Music > Library > Scraper settings is the location you want.
Make sure you enable the HTBackdrops option. Now, scan in your music library to XBMC. It should take a while, and should automatically grab the thumbs and fanart for the artist level. It should then be possible to "export" these files back to your library, saving you from having to re-download everything manually if you re-do your library. I'd need to know a bit more about your setup to give more specific instructions, like how you music is organized and what OS you're running. Post if you have any questions or art requests, there are several dudes on the forum (myself included) who are working on artifying everything in their prospective music collections.
Good news! XBMC does not write to mp3 files (or any other music files).
It will read them into the library just fine and, at your option, you can then choose to download artist thumbs and fanart (see the context menu).
EDIT: Instead of what SleepyP posted, I would suggest you first scan your music into the library without having internet lookups on. Once you're sure it's all in and correct, you can then proceed to do the net lookups via the context menu.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Cool, well this sound promising!
I am running r22516, is this new enough? (Windows 7) Using Aeon 65 1.0
My music is currently sorted into artist folders and each individual album in its own folder inside the artist folder. I also have a folder of compilations, and a folder of soundtracks. These have the individual artist tags set, and the album artist tag set to Various Artists.
actually now that I think about it, the recent changes are all for extra info. You should be able to get artist art and fan art from HTBackdrops with the current scraper. As far as layout goes, that should be perfect. When you export to "individual files" you should end up with stuff like this:
Music Folder\The Beatles\Folder.jpg (the artist-level thumb)
Music Folder\The Beatles\Fanart.jpg (the artist-level backdrop)
You will probably want to simply skip scanning in your various artists folder. I'm not sure why you have your "soundtracks" and "compilations" split like that, so I couldn't tell you what to do there. Like Jon said, you may want to run a quick scan with no internet lookups turned on to make sure everything is OK. I suspect if you're using Tag & Rename (which is what I use too) then your tags are probably all fixed up with OCD tender loving care
Are you running the DX branch of XBMC, or just the "standard"?
Is the music fanart supported in all skins? I tried dropping a fanart.jpg in the artist folder within my drive but it didnt appear for some reason.
Structure is this:
F:\The Beatles\fanart.jpg .... it works fine with picking up the album art which I drop into each album i.e. F:\The Beatles\01 Please Please Me\folder.jpg but oddly, the fanart doesnt appear....might just be the skin or something I done.
I also couldn't (under the above structure) get ANY folder.jpg so I went through (currently at letter T !) and got them myself at 600x600...good quality and twas "fun"
Help on the fanart welcome tho!
Cheers...
Is there a way to scan the fanart/thumbs for all artists at once? I can only figure out how to do each one separately. Thanks.
i want to scan my music with xbmc and have a couple of questions...
all my files are with tags and album art and in my itunes library on an external drive. the itunes plugin do not import my library probably couse it's on an external drive, but i was thinking couldn't i just scan the /itunes media/music folder? all the artists and albums are in folder structure artist/albums. the only thing i'm worried about is that xbmc are going to change tags and cover art, etc. i don't want that. only to scan the music. can i have xbmc to look for artist infor, fanart,etc without writing to or changing my music files and folder?
hope someone can help!
thx!