Hello all,
When I first scanned my music library into XBMC, I ended up (after several hours) with artist info, fan art, thumbs, biography data etc with no problems (bar the odd missing item). At some point along the way I had to reinstall my PC, so I exported my music library to individual xml files. When I restored it I lost all that extra detail. I've got no thumbs or fanart, and if I use the 'Get thumb' or 'get fanart' options from the artist info menu, I only get the option to select a local source, not a remote one. I've got no artist info, and if I query or refresh the artist info I get a brief 'downloading artist info' dialogue pop-up, but then no artist info gets downloaded. Has something gone screwy with the import? I dont really want to have to scan it all from scratch again, but if that's the only option then how do I do that?
I don't know about the music side, but on the movie side, when you do an export to individual files, it asks you if you want to export fanart and covers and such? did you maybe say 'no' to this.
Assuming music works similarly to movies:
you should be able to look into your music folders and see the .nfo files for each artist or album (not sure what level they would be at for music). If you see the .nfo file and no fanart.jpg or .tbn file, then I'd say your images didn't export.
Hmm well this certainly seems to be the case, however it happened, as I've no jpegs or tbn files stored. How do I 'reset' my library so that I can rescan and download these items again? As I said, I seem to have lost the ability to update my artist information using the context menus.
Well, maybe someone else will pipe, in, but I'm not sure you can. As I understand it, xbmc will use the scraper's (like it did the first time you loaded your music) only if it does not find a .nfo file. Since it is finding an nfo, it is reading from it to get your metadata.
What would probably work is if you delete the .nfo files. Then xbmc would rescrap everything.
Maybe try just deleting a couple and see if it rescraps for those artist/albums.
If that works, just delete the rest of the .nfo files.
You can just do a search (in windows) starting at your root music directory for *.nfo and then delete.
OK so I deleted all the nfo files (I only had album.nfo files present), and rescanned. A handful of artists now have fanart and/or thumbs (maybe 5 or 6 out of 307), but the rest still have no info. I can pick an artist and go into their artist information (which will be blank) from the context menu. If I choose 'refresh' I'll get an update message and then it returns the bio information and will let me manually select remote fanart and thumbs. The same thing happens with the albums; I dont get any of the synopsis info unless I manually refresh it myself. Why isnt it doing this automatically? All my tags are in order so its not related to that. Incidentally this only seems to be an issue for existing items in my library. I added an album for a new artist and it picked up all the info on the first scan.
So after hunting around the forum for ideas I decided to delete my music database under /userdata/database and then allowed XBMC to rescan my entire library. Now I find that I have the Artist biography data and album synopsis data, but I'm *still* not getting the fanart and thumbs. Its obviously saving this info somewhere else because once everything had been scanned in to the library again I found that the only artists with thumbs and fanarts were the few that I had manually downloaded before I blew away the music database. I obviously need to clear some data somewhere that is preventing the download of new fanart. Any ideas anybody
what album / artist scraper are you using? (default is allmusic).
Do you have additional information during updates enabled in settings?
What XBMC version are you using?
I am using the allmusic scraper and yes I have the additional updates enabled. XBMC version is 10.1 stable.
The issue seems to be that all the artists that I imported from my old installation are defaulting to a specific fanart and thumbnail image (fanart= acdc, thumb = Will Young). Even after I deleted the music db they still seem to pick up these default images from somewhere. I think that's why they wont pick up the correct ones when I rescan the library. Trouble is I cant find these images to remove them (they arent in my music directory structure).
You could try deleting your userdata/Thumbnails folder (after making a copy of it somewhere) and see if that sorts it out. I haven't tried doing this before though.
The entire thumbnails directory does include thumbnails for tv and movies though so it may not be a good idea.
Music is a special directory in there, so it should be safe to move away while testing.