[pkscout]

One caveat (and this is buried in the wiki but not necessarily obvious). If your artwork is on a remote volume, sometimes it won't show unless you map a local drive/mount point.

I'll be damned. I saw that in the wiki but just as you, I felt it didn't make sense and figured it was some outdated issue. But now I've mapped my remote music folder and it does use the extrafanart I have in my music library! Thanks. Now if I can only get your add-on to place new fanart in that remote location

If you set the local folder priority to USE BOTH them remote images will be stored in the local image directory IF at least one image exists in the local artist directory.

[pkscout]

With the death of last.FM images, I am sort of keen on protecting the artists images in my artist slideshow cache. I have created a local artist/extrafanart tree but I am wondering is there anyway to get from the hash back to artist so I can merge the cache into my local artist tree?

I don't think so. The call that creates the cache name is really meant to be a one way thing. Given the number of people in a similar boat as you, I think I'm going to whip up something that will, through brute force, rename the folders to the artist name. It will be a separate add-on and probably won't be submitted to the official repo. If I just do renaming, you'd have to manually merge them, but I think I could set it up where you tell the script where you want the files dumped and then it would pull them from the cache and put them in the right place. I'm a little nervous about that though, as it would never be perfect.

I suspect it will be the end of the year before I can get to a project like this though.

[curtis-r]

If you set the local folder priority to USE BOTH them remote images will be stored in the local image directory IF at least one image exists in the local artist directory.

So, no plan for a setting to place the images in the artist's directory regardless? Thanks for your help.

[cw-kid]

Hi pkscuot

I installed v1.5.8.2 by manually copying over all the files in to the /storage/.xbmc/addons/script.artistslideshow folder and then rebooted the HTPC.

And I can confirm that if I play an album which is tagged as "Various Artists" only, then I still just get a blank / black box.

Debug log file: http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=93643


Many thanks

[cw-kid]

Hi

I can confirm that the Use Fallback Folder option works as expected. I copied the "Various Artists" fanart images to a local folder on the HTPC:

/storage/.xbmc/userdata/addon_data/script.artistslideshow/fallback

I then enabled the fallback setting in AS and pointed it to this folder.

Now when I play a compilation album that has each track tagged correctly with each artist name, for the ones that there is no remote fanart for, it will fallback and just display the "Various Artists" fanart images instead, which is better than a blank empty box.

Not sure why v1.5.8.2 wasn't picking up from the Internet "Various Artists" fanart when the album is tagged as just "Various Artists" etc, please see my previous post.

Many thanks.

[devilshura]

For Various Artists that has tag "Various Artists" in artist-name.I make local-artist folder for it, and point for not found/no tag-artist with fallback.
e.g.

Various Artists folder in local artist folder

Show In music visualization


And for fallback images folder

[cw-kid]

For Various Artists that has tag "Various Artists" in artist-name.I make local-artist folder for it, and point for not found/no tag-artist with fallback.
e.g.

Various Artists folder in local artist folder

Show In music visualization


And for fallback images folder

Hi Devilshura

Fancy sharing your music fallback images with us? They look quite good!

I can see what you have done and I think why it works for you is because your main music path is D:\Music_Artist\ which is a local drive.

And I think I am correct in saying - so when you play an album tagged with artist-name = "Various Artists" Artist SlideShow will display the images in the various artists\extrafanart folder on your D:\ drive. And if it can't find an image to display either remote or local for a particular artist, it will then display the images in your fallback folder instead.

This doesn't work the same for me, because my main music path is a network path SMB://WHS/Music. So Artist SlideShow will only display Remote images and not "Local" ones. Maybe I need to figure out how to add a mount point in Linux / OpenElec somehow ?



I do however have the same Various Artists folder on my file server, but Artist SlideShow won't use it currently.



This is why I asked if Artist SlideShow could instead display the "Various Artists" fanart images from Fanart.tv (Remote) when I play an album and the artist-name is tagged as "Various Artists"

[Lockos]

Hi everyone !

I'm writing in this topic because I'm having some trouble with the artist slideshow lately.

I'm running XBMC frodo V.12.2 with Aeon Nox 4.0.9, spotiMC beta 4 (which is the latest) and tried to solve my issue with several versions of AS (1.5.8, 1.5.4, 1.5.5.0.1 and 1.5.5.0.2) with always the same results :

The script seems to suffer from several bugs when it has to display the lastfm additional info of the artists.nIn most cases, I don't have the bio and when I get it, it's in the wrong language (I set it in order to have this info in french but it shows info in English while the french text actually exists in lastfm site). On the other hand, no problem with local music...weird.

Other thing, with my eden version and last versions of AD, I can't display the spotimc artists pictures while again it's working with local music. I haven't changed anything on my setup and didn't do any update.

I read that lastfm has recently changed its API...is it the reason of all this trouble ?

Thanks in advance for telling me what are your setup and how did you manage to configure it properly with spotimc and Aeon Nox 4.0.9, I'd be sooooo grateful !

[ktjensen]

LastFM is a paid service. The old API does not work now.

[pkscout]

I installed v1.5.8.2 by manually copying over all the files in to the /storage/.xbmc/addons/script.artistslideshow folder and then rebooted the HTPC.

And I can confirm that if I play an album which is tagged as "Various Artists" only, then I still just get a blank / black box.

I see the issue. AS caches even a null response from MusicBrainz and won't check again for a few weeks. So until your current empty Various Artists MBID ages out, AS won't try and use the hard coded MBID. The way to resolve that is to find the Various Artists cache folder and delete it. Either that or just wait a couple weeks.

---

LastFM is a paid service. The old API does not work now.

I don't really keep up with the Last.fm stuff, and it seems like there have been a number of changes that are causing issues. I'll start taking a look at at options there are to make the Last.fm stuff work again, but if I have to pay for API access I'll probably just drop Last.fm support all together and rely on theaudiodb.com for that information. The only thing last.fm provides that theaudiodb.com doesn't is related artists.

[curtis-r]

I know much has been discussed recently in regards to the handling of "Various Artists" but I'm having a minor issue:

I have a folder of holiday music, with sub-folders of each album. All Album Artists tags are "Various Artists". Artist tags are the true artist name. No artwork displays during visualization at all. I even tried creating an extrafanart folder in the holiday music folder with some fanart, but still no artwork displays. My settings:

EDIT: v 1.5.8.2. And to just clarify my question, shouldn't my fallback folder kick-in?

[cw-kid]

I installed v1.5.8.2 by manually copying over all the files in to the /storage/.xbmc/addons/script.artistslideshow folder and then rebooted the HTPC.

And I can confirm that if I play an album which is tagged as "Various Artists" only, then I still just get a blank / black box.

I see the issue. AS caches even a null response from MusicBrainz and won't check again for a few weeks. So until your current empty Various Artists MBID ages out, AS won't try and use the hard coded MBID. The way to resolve that is to find the Various Artists cache folder and delete it. Either that or just wait a couple weeks.

Hi

I think its working now, I deleted the folder(s) for the "Various Artists" which was:

\Userdata\addon_data\script.artistslideshow\ArtistInformation\121caa73
\Userdata\addon_data\script.artistslideshow\ArtistSlideshow\121caa73

I turned off the fallback option and removed that fallback folder I added, just so it wouldn't confuse things.

Now when I play an album tagged as artist-name = "Various Artists" the various artists fanart is now displayed by Artist SlideShow.

Think I will now use the fallback option with some generic music fanart images if I can find some good ones, as @devilshura suggested!

Thanks again!

[cw-kid]

I know much has been discussed recently in regards to the handling of "Various Artists" but I'm having a minor issue:

I have a folder of holiday music, with sub-folders of each album. All Album Artists tags are "Various Artists". Artist tags are the true artist name. No artwork displays during visualization at all. I even tried creating an extrafanart folder in the holiday music folder with some fanart, but still no artwork displays. My settings:

EDIT: v 1.5.8.2. And to just clarify my question, shouldn't my fallback folder kick-in?

"No artwork displays during visualization at all" Your using MQ5 right?

"And to just clarify my question, shouldn't my fallback folder kick-in?"

The images in the Artist SlideShow fall-back folder should appear in the small Artist SlideShow box presumably when no other fanart is found for that artist.

In this first screen shot you can see Artist SlideShow is displaying my new fall-back image(s), whilst playing the artist "Method Man" on the 187 compilation / soundtrack album.

But looking on Fanart.tv for "Method Man" there are two background images available. So should Artist SlideShow have displayed those images instead? I am unsure. I don't have any Method Man albums he is just on this compilation album etc.

Note - In my XBMC Music library, I only have album artists listed in Music-Artists, I turned on a setting to hide compilation artists.



In this screen shot a DJ Shadow track is playing on the same compilation album and all his artwork is displayed correctly, I do have some DJ Shadow albums on my file server and there is an artist folder for him that contains the various extra artwork images.



I wrote more here about issues with MQ5 and playing compilation albums and issues with the background fanart. Also note that there is a bug in MQ5 with artist logos and compilation albums see here.

Thanks

[cw-kid]

Hi

If anyone is looking for some generic music fanart images for the Artist SlideShow fallback folder feature, I put together 30 images tonight that I downloaded off Google images, all are either 1280x720 or 1920x1080. You can download them off my SkyDrive here.

[curtis-r]

Your using MQ5 right?

Yeah, MQ5, but technically I have my own custom mod of his visualization. But my issue is the same with his stock one. I quickly tried Confluence but clearly I need to set something up b/c no art shows for anything. I'm just confused why my fallback art doesn't typically show when no fanart is found locally or remotely. Thanks for your help.