[ktjensen]

Would like a listing of all the folder locations for this addon. Is that in the WIKI for this addon? Certainly will want to modify and remove some artwork that is wrongly associated with any artist.

[cw-kid]

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.

In the Music Library on the MQ5 top menu you have gone to the "Collection/Change View" pull down menu and under "Get Artwork Artist/Album" specified the path to your root music directory?

I recommend in the MQ5 - Music Full Screen - OSD Menu - Settings you only use one of the SlideShow options and do not use one of the Artist Fanart options which seem buggy with compilation albums.

The Artist SlideShow options work correctly. See here where I try and document some of the issues with this.

Generally music background fanart with MQ5 is buggy in several areas.

Please post any replies on the MQ5 thread as we are getting off topic now in this thread as Artist SlideShow v1.5.8.2 is working as expected.

Thanks

[scott967]

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.

That would be fantastic if you get a chance to work on this.

scott s.
.

[pkscout]

Would like a listing of all the folder locations for this addon. Is that in the WIKI for this addon? Certainly will want to modify and remove some artwork that is wrongly associated with any artist.

It's not in the wiki. The only programmatically set location for images or cache files is the addon data directory for the addon (userdata/addon_data/script.artistslieshow). The images are in Artist Slideshow. All the cache files are in Artist Information.

[ktjensen]

Just overall this plugin seems to be functioning much better. Is there a switch to activate that would play the album art in the sequence of artist rotating art while playing ? The album cover is just another form of art of the artist.

[pkscout]

Just overall this plugin seems to be functioning much better. Is there a switch to activate that would play the album art in the sequence of artist rotating art while playing ? The album cover is just another form of art of the artist.

AS really just downloads remote artwork and then tells the skin where to find the images. If you are using local folders, you can put whatever images you want in there (including album art), but downloading the album art would be up to you. There are some other add ons that would do that for you I think. The skin controls how images are played back, so you would either need to modify your skin or talk to the skin author about adding an option for sequential playback instead of random. In Confluence (if you are using the skin files I modified), you can open MusicVisualization.xml and look for the following:

Code:

<control type="multiimage">
    <posx>0</posx>
    <posy>0</posy>
    <width>1280</width>
    <height>720</height>
    <imagepath background="true">$INFO[Window(Visualisation).Property(ArtistSlideshow)]</imagepath>
    <aspectratio>keep</aspectratio>
    <timeperimage>10000</timeperimage>
    <fadetime>2000</fadetime>
    <randomize>true</randomize>
</control>

Change the randomize section to "false" and that would play the images in alphabetical order.

[curtis-r]

The fallback folder is now working. I'm thinking I wasn't giving the script enough time to give up on an internet search.

Anyhow, I cannot figure out where the local "Various Artist" bio is stored, so I can remove it. I don't want a scrolling description of what a "Various Artist" is, as is seen in this image from a thread prior.

[pkscout]

Anyhow, I cannot figure out where the local "Various Artist" bio is stored, so I can remove it. I don't want a scrolling description of what a "Various Artist" is, as is seen in this image from a thread prior.

Look in your XBMC data directory in userdata/addon_data/script.artistslideshow/ArtistInformation. I believe the Various Artists folder is hashed as 121caa73. Here's the thing though. If you just delete the file, AS will happily download it again. And if you edit it, every couple of weeks AS will refresh the file from online, overwriting your changes. The best thing to do would be to follow the wiki instructions on overriding the downloaded information with local information (it's section 5). The only override file you would need to create is artistbio.nfo. I the content section of the file, just put a couple of spaces.

Man did I know "fixing" Various Artists was going to open a can of worms. I don't really want to programmatically set the Various Artists bio to empty, because then I'm sure someone will complain when the bio doesn't show up. So the override method above is going to be the solution for folks who don't want the bio.

[ktjensen]

Pkscuot - just happy it all works. Yes it's very complicated and appreciate your time spent on it.

[curtis-r]

I don't really want to programmatically set the Various Artists bio to empty, because then I'm sure someone will complain when the bio doesn't show up. So the override method above is going to be the solution for folks who don't want the bio.

So true, which is why when it comes to nitpicky things like this, I'm more than happy to make mods myself and not assume everyone wants it my way; as long as someone can show me the way, which you clearly have done. Thanks for the excellent, detailed instructions. Again, the best add-on.

[curtis-r]

Look in your XBMC data directory in userdata/addon_data/script.artistslideshow/ArtistInformation. I believe the Various Artists folder is hashed as 121caa73. Here's the thing though. If you just delete the file, AS will happily download it again. And if you edit it, every couple of weeks AS will refresh the file from online, overwriting your changes. The best thing to do would be to follow the wiki instructions on overriding the downloaded information with local information (it's section 5). The only override file you would need to create is artistbio.nfo. I the content section of the file, just put a couple of spaces.

Okay, did what you said & my new various artist 'description' works perfectly in file mode, but in Library mode it still shows the old lenghty Various Artists Information. I actually deleted everything in ArtistInformation to be safe. Did xbmc scrape this various artist info during a library scan?

[pkscout]

Okay, did what you said & my new various artist 'description' works perfectly in file mode, but in Library mode it still shows the old lenghty Various Artists Information. I actually deleted everything in ArtistInformation to be safe. Did xbmc scrape this various artist info during a library scan?

I believe there is an option when you set up your scraper to have XBMC download additional artist information, and that would include the bio. In that case you have two places that the artist bio is stored. One is in the XBMC database, the other is in a text file that AS uses. Which of those is used (and when) is based on which skin you have. To answer your question about data displayed in library versus file mode, your best bet is the ask in the Skin specific support thread. You can find the skin support forum here:

http://forum.xbmc.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=67

[cezar]

Friends is any way to save on any folders on my box picture downladed when im watch music.
In last days im hear very day Nightwish i think will be nice saved picture and next no download again and again .
I think will be good if this plugin will be saved picture in lokal folder.

[curtis-r]

I think will be good if this plugin will be saved picture in lokal folder.

AS does save artwork, but in ...\addon_data\script.artistslideshow\ArtistSlideshow. It should not be redownloading. Play some music and check the folder for newly-created *.tbn files. Then you know it's saving them. If you want to view the image to make extra sure, rename an image from *.tbn to *.jpg.

If you're asking whether AS can be directed to save the images in your music collection ("local") folder, it cannot, but I've been relentless & a pest at pointing out that would be great . Actually, let me correct myself. AS does save images locally if 2 conditions are met: 1) you have an "extrafanart" folder in the artist folder. 2) there is at least 1 image already in it.

[pkscout]

The script seems to suffer from several bugs when it has to display the lastfm additional info of the artists. In 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.

I found a bug. As some point I accidentally stopped telling last.fm in what language I wanted the results. I've added that back to the code and am testing internally.

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.

The current versions of AS isn't supported on XBMC Eden. Frodo only. So it's possible I updated something that broke Eden support.

As for spotimc, it should be working in Frodo, so I'd need to see a debug log to help further.

And in regards to the last.fm API changes, as far as I can tell, none of the calls (beyond the removal of the image return feature) AS uses have changed, been depreciated, or moved to any kind of paid status. So I think we're just having "normal" issues.