[maartenl]

@Martijn; sorry, I was not aware (new here). I have removed the log. Thx.
@pkscuot; thanks for your advice and for looking into the problem.

[pkscout]

So, the problem is another freaking unicode issue. I'm going to go ahead and say that it probably won't get fixed, as I can't ever get the unicode stuff to behave consistently, so it's basically impossible to tell what the issue is.

The good news is that the error is happening during the attempt to migrate the old .nfo files to the new names and locations. So here's the workaround.

1- go to your XBMC user directory see http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Userdata for location)
2- go to addon_data/script.artistslideshow
3- in that directory create a text file called migrationcheck.nfo
4- in that text file put the string '1.5.4' (without quotes)

That will fool AS into thinking that it has already done the migration and it won't try again. The only effect of that change is that your old cached .nfo files won't be moved. It's not a big deal, as they'll all get recreated as needed. You'll just end up with a bunch of orphan .nfo files in your artist image directories. They're really small and don't take up much space.

[maartenl]

Thanks for the workaround.
I have artist folders that contain special characters, e.g. <Cæcilie Norby> and <BLØF>, maybe that's causing the script to crash?

[ferent]

Perfect workaround, thanks!!

[pkscout]

Thanks for the workaround.
I have artist folders that contain special characters, e.g. <Cæcilie Norby> and <BLØF>, maybe that's causing the script to crash?

It shouldn't. Seriously it shouldn't. I have tested and re-coded, and re-tested, and used about every scenario I can think of. Extended characters in everything from song names to album names to artist names to folder name of all types work fine on my setup and, I think, for most people. But every once in awhile some don't work, and I don't know why. I remember another developer posting here that there are bugs in the python Unicode support and provided a non-trivially sized set of code to work around it, but I didn't really understand what it was doing, so I opted not to go that route.

If you do get crashes, please continue to post debug logs (see my signature for instructions). I'll look at it and at least try and be upfront about what I will try and fix.

[maartenl]

Thanks for the workaround.
I have artist folders that contain special characters, e.g. <Cæcilie Norby> and <BLØF>, maybe that's causing the script to crash?

It shouldn't. Seriously it shouldn't. I have tested and re-coded, and re-tested, and used about every scenario I can think of. Extended characters in everything from song names to album names to artist names to folder name of all types work fine on my setup and, I think, for most people. But every once in awhile some don't work, and I don't know why. I remember another developer posting here that there are bugs in the python Unicode support and provided a non-trivially sized set of code to work around it, but I didn't really understand what it was doing, so I opted not to go that route.

If you do get crashes, please continue to post debug logs (see my signature for instructions). I'll look at it and at least try and be upfront about what I will try and fix.

Ok, Thanks a lot for the good work. Meanwhile I have tried to use AS (after applying the workaround, thanks for that!) with artists like <Cæcilie Norby> and AS 1.5.4. works as opposed to 1.5.2. that stopped working correctly with special characters. Major improvement!

Seems annoying that Python behaves kind of randomly and you can't get hold of what's causing the bug. Luckily the workaround you provided worked!

One other question: I deleted my .nfo files since migration did not work (script error) and have chosen to let AS re-download the .nfo files. However AEON NOX skin expects those files to be in the extrafanart folder and not in the local cache! This means I cannot get the similar artists etc, information anymore in AEON NOX. Is there a solution to this?

UPDATE
Tried again today, And now seems to work with AEON NOX. Sorry for the hassle.

[maartenl]

Have tried the new script, v1.5.4 and it is definitely an improvement! Thanks.

There's however still strange behaviour with artist that have special characters, e.g. José James, Cæcilie Norby etc. I discover in these cases artwork is downloaded to the local cache but not to the artist's remote folder (which resides on my NAS in this case and whose share is mounted through CIFS) as opposed to artists without special characters...

[pkscout]

Have tried the new script, v1.5.4 and it is definitely an improvement! Thanks.

There's however still strange behaviour with artist that have special characters, e.g. José James, Cæcilie Norby etc. I discover in these cases artwork is downloaded to the local cache but not to the artist's remote folder (which resides on my NAS in this case and whose share is mounted through CIFS) as opposed to artists without special characters...

That would seem to indicate that AS is not finding the remote folder. I remember running into another problem is the code that ASCII and Unicode compares will always be false, so that might be the problem. It might also be a CIFS thing, as I don't have a separate server here and have never validated to code against artwork stored on another machine. For one of your problem artists, could you post a path to the remote folder. I'll try and duplicate something here to see if I can figure out what's going on.

[maartenl]

Have tried the new script, v1.5.4 and it is definitely an improvement! Thanks.

There's however still strange behaviour with artist that have special characters, e.g. José James, Cæcilie Norby etc. I discover in these cases artwork is downloaded to the local cache but not to the artist's remote folder (which resides on my NAS in this case and whose share is mounted through CIFS) as opposed to artists without special characters...

That would seem to indicate that AS is not finding the remote folder. I remember running into another problem is the code that ASCII and Unicode compares will always be false, so that might be the problem. It might also be a CIFS thing, as I don't have a separate server here and have never validated to code against artwork stored on another machine. For one of your problem artists, could you post a path to the remote folder. I'll try and duplicate something here to see if I can figure out what's going on.

Thanks for your help! Truly appreciate it. A path to which AS won't store artwork is: \\NAS4FREE\main\muziek\modern\João Gilberto\
As I said paths with no special characters e.g. \\NAS4FREE\main\muziek\modern\David Bowie\ give no problems.

UPDATE
Further test learns that AS won't store artwork in paths with 'special' characters but will read though!. When I play an artist with special character(s) in its name, the artwork is stored locally. When I subsequently manually move the locally stored artwork to the remote folder, it will read the artwork the next time I play that artist's music.

UPDATE II
I was to eager to post first update. After moving local artwork it seemed the script was reading the artwork remotely. But it seems the artwork was somewhere cached in memory. When changing artist and back, the script again makes a local artwork folder.

[Hetoft]

Hi pkscout,

Thanks for the reply you gave me. Makes perfect sense, and everything works as it should now.

You might want to take a look at this recent issue with the Spotimc (Spotify) addon:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1476040

I won't be home before next week, so I won't be able to provide a debug log before then.

Regards,
Rasmus

[mazkolain]

Hello pkscout, I'm the developer of Spotimc.

Here's a brief explanation of how the audio stuff works:
Spotimc serves audio streams to xbmc through an embedded local http server, and due to some restrictions imposed by libspotify's design only one audio stream can be served at a time. Any attempt to fetch another stream while the current one is playing will cause the latter one to end prematurely.

Since Spotimc streams are somewhat "delicate" (and also the source of many headaches...), they may be affected by other services trying to analyze them. For example, it's the case of some lyric scripts that read the raw audio data on their attempt to search embedded lyrics (by using xbmcvfs.File), causing the described premature end of streams.

I've checked out the source of AS searching for such operation, but couldn't find any code trying to analyze streams by hand. The closest thing I've noticed is the fact that it tries to find related .nfo files (which does not affect Spotimc at all). Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks for your support!

[pkscout]

Thanks for the info. As you saw, the only analysis of the audio stream I do is via either JSON or XBMC function calls. But 1.5.4 does that more frequently than 1.5.2. I was going to point to the JSON calls as a potential culprit, but I changed over to those in 1.5.2 and thus would have expected AS to cause problems earlier if that was really the case.

Anyway, if folks get some logs and post them here, I'd be happy to take a look.

[Hack_kid]

Hey just reporting a bug. with the latest version and frodo the script will only download artwork when (i'll use aeon nox as example) your in the music vis screen with the music info showing. as soon as you hit info again and drop down to the vis only. it stops trying to download for that artist. and then stops completely and just results in a black box in the upper left...i reverted to 1.5.3.003 on your github and am trying that right now...i did notice that when i hit play on my music it started downloading right away before i even went into the visuals

[pkscout]

Hey just reporting a bug. with the latest version and frodo the script will only download artwork when (i'll use aeon nox as example) your in the music vis screen with the music info showing. as soon as you hit info again and drop down to the vis only. it stops trying to download for that artist. and then stops completely and just results in a black box in the upper left...i reverted to 1.5.3.003 on your github and am trying that right now...i did notice that when i hit play on my music it started downloading right away before i even went into the visuals

I'll need a debug log. What I think you are describing is definitely not consistent with the way it works for me with the modified Confluence files. But it's possible I'm not completely understanding what you're describing either.

[RoboHoboMK2]

Hey!

Terribly sorry if this has been answered earlier - I've spent four hours each day for three days trying to find a solution, but it seems I'm horribly inept with technology these days.

I'm trying to get an artist slideshow running in the tab screen (not sure what the proper name is), but I can't get it to work. The slideshow seems to run just fine in the Home Screen, but as soon as I hit tab, it reverts to a static artist image.

Some basic info:

Music folder hierarchy: [artist] -> [album] -> [song.flac]
Addons installed in the pursuit of a working slideshow: cdART, Artist Slideshow
Skin: Aeon Nox
XBMC release: 12.2 "Frodo"

I honestly don't know how to use cdART properly, or if I even need it to use Artist Slideshow. My head is boiling, heh x).

Appreciate any help!