[Powerhouse]

I have a question, for those of you using Symphony. How does it work on Compilation albums? Billboard Top 40 for example, where you have 40 songs from various artists.

Does it create artist.nfo for each artist?
How does it capture artwork for a Compilation Album?

I do think it looks great, and can't wait to try this out.

Keep up the good work Ethyria.

[Ethyria]

@Powerhouse, To be completely honest I haven't even thought about the best way to approach compilations. I would love to hear ideas from everyone on the best way they would approach it. I believe I used to just have an artist called 'Various Artists' and 'Soundtracks' and set the album artist to one of those and just use generic musical related backdrops. Definitely need some ideas on that one.

A quick update on Symphony. I have spent the week bug fixing and putting in some additional error handling with plans to upload another update today but have decided to wait until I implement one more feature which I find to be critical.

At the moment I am going through and scraping data for all my music at the same time as developing the app, figuring it's the best way to catch bugs and much needed features. Spending quite a bit of time scraping info I became incredibly fustrated having to go into each album to find out if metadata was missing. It was driving me absolutely insane, so with that in mind I've almost finished work on adding metadata icons (ticks and crosses like in the artist list) for the albums list, so at a glance you can see what is missing. I've also added an extra check in the artist list which, if all metadata is present for all albums for that artist, it will be ticked, if not it will be a a cross, so you can also see which artists need attention without going into each of them in succession.

This brought up an interesting dilemma with the NFO's, and on what I consinder to qualify as a complete. I wrestled with this for a bit as all my albums differ on whether they have 'instruments' or 'moods' listed, 'disbanded' and 'died' dates which proved disasterous when implementing the above feature, and I know that everyone here will have a different idea aswell. I'm going to release an update on Monday that will have this feature and for an album to qualify as complete it will need a Title, Year and Description.

Now I know everyone will have a different idea on the qualifications for 'complete', so I will be adding the ability to specify which fields are needed to qualify as 'complete'. Unfortunately this won't be in Monday's update as there is a few things ahead of it in the queue but it's coming.

Again, I would love to hear how everyone handles Soundtracks and Compilations so I can begin mapping out support for them.

Also, I would love to know the folder structure you guys use for music videos. Personally I have a top level Music Videos folder with a subfolder for each artist, then all Music Videos together in the artist folder, like so:

- Music Videos
--- Artist1
-------- artist-song1.mp4
-------- artist-song1-thumb.jpg
-------- artist-song1.nfo
-------- artist-song2.mp4
-------- artist-song2-thumb.jpg
-------- artist-song2.mp3
--- Artist2
-------- artist-song1.mp4
-------- artist-song1-thumb.jpg
-------- artist-song1.nfo
-------- artist-song2.mp4
-------- artist-song2-thumb.jpg
-------- artist-song2.nfo
....


I would love to know what everyone else uses so I can account for it.

Anyway, thanks again for all the support, It really makes developing this app worth while.

[ccruzen]

This is awesome, have been waiting for something like this for a long time.

As for bugs, I've got my music stored on my unRAID server and Symphony kept closing every time I tried to scrape an artist. I found however that if I made sure the disks were spun up that it would work fine.
Just something to consider.

Again, can't tell you how awesome this is/is going to be. Thanks a ton for sharing.

[Ethyria]

@ccruze, unfortunately as I've stated before Symphony was built from the ground up soley for personal use and I had no intention of sharing it. I built it to my requirements, it's only in the last few weeks I've decided to share it. Which means at its core it is still a .Net WPF application that is built and tested with Windows OS and NTFS windows shares in mind.

I apologise for the slow updates out I will continue to deliver what I can,

[Powerhouse]

Woohoo, Music Video support.

Please see my thread here...http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=163814

It has everything I've found out about Music Videos support in XBMC (which isn't much, and the Wiki needs updating to reflect this). I've spoken with the XBMC Wiki guy in a forum post regarding what needs to be changed in the Wiki, just not sure he had time to update it yet.

With that in mind, here is an overview of what works and doesn't in Music Videos (and you can read more in the above post as well).

My layout is the following: Artist\musicvideo.mp4(or mpg, avi, etc).
The following artwork names work:
artist - musicvideo-poster.jpg
artist - musicvideo-thumb.jpg
Also, artist - musicvideo-fanart.jpg should work, but I don't know now to bring it up in ACE.
poster.jpg
fanart.jpg

So the musicvideo-poster.jpg would be the Album cover. The musicvideo-thumb.jpg would be CDART, and the musicvideo-fanart.jpg would be whatever fanart you have for the group. For examples on these check out the fanart.tv, in my example below, I used several of the arts from fanart.tv (http://fanart.tv/artist/bf600e2b-dc2d-48...87cd0/311/). the poster.jpg would be the Artist picture you see when you view Concerts/Music Videos by Artist, and the fanart.jpg shows up as the background when you actually click on an album to see the music inside.

So for example, the music group 311 folder looks like this...

311 - All Mixed Up.mpg
311 - All Mixed Up.nfo
311 - All Mixed Up-fanart.jpg (different image than the fanart.jpg, but didn't load)
311 - All Mixed Up-poster.jpg
311 - Amber.avi
311 - Amber.nfo
311 - Amber-poster.jpg
311 - Beautiful Disaster.mp4
311 - Beautiful Disaster.nfo
311 - Beautiful Disaster-poster.jpg
311 - Come Original.mpg
311 - Come Original.nfo
311 - Come Original-fanart.jpg (different image than the fanart.jpg, but didn't load)
311 - Come Original-poster.jpg
311 - Come Original-thumb.png
311 - Down.mpg
311 - Down.nfo
311 - Down-poster.jpg
fanart.jpg
poster.jpg

Here is an example of the nfo files (this is for 311 - All Mixed Up.nfo)...

<musicvideo>
<title>All Mixed Up</title>
<artist>311</artist>
<album>311</album>
<genre>Alternative rock</genre>
<director></director>
<composer></composer>
<studio>Interscope</studio>
<year>1995</year>
<runtime>3:50</runtime>
</musicvideo>

One of the big issues I've found (and based on the Wiki information) which doesn't work is...

I'm using the ACE Skin, with the Right List View, there is a picture frame at the bottom left of this view, but I haven't figured out what loads in it. There is also whatever Albums you defined in your NFO files. The Albums view also has information like Themes, Type, and Mood. Which according to the XBMC Wiki, should load from the artist.nfo (needs to be lower case for some reason). I have tried putting an artist.nfo under the artist folder, but it doesn't load the correct information. Here is an example of one I made for 4 Non Blondes...

http://musicbrainz.org/artist/efef848b-6...a48fbdd51d
<artist>
<name>4 Non Blondes</name>
<genre>Pop/Rock</genre>
<style>Alternative Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Adult Alternative Pop/Rock, Contemporary Pop/Rock</style>
<mood>Cathartic, Quirky, Self-Conscious, Tense/Anxious, Earnest, Rebellious, Angst-Ridden, Reflective, Searching, Witty, Yearning, Aggressive, Brooding, Irreverent, Organic, Provocative, Melancholy</mood>
<yearsactive>1980's-1990's</yearsactive>
<born></born>
<formed>1989</formed>
<instruments></instruments>
<biography>4 Non Blondes was an American rock band from San Francisco, California, formed in 1989. The group was formed by bassist Christa Hillhouse, guitarist Shaunna Hall, drummer Wanda Day, and vocalist and guitarist Linda Perry. Prior to the release of their first album, Roger Rocha replaced Hall on guitar, and Dawn Richardson replaced Day on drums. They hit the charts in 1993 with "What's Up?", their only major hit single. Perry left the band in 1994 to begin a solo career, and the remaining members disbanded shortly after.</biography>
<died></died>
<disbanded>1995</disbanded>
<artist>

Perhaps it needs to be named something other than artist.nfo. I've tried the artistname.nfo, and the artist - musicvideo.nfo, these don't work either.


Anyway, please check out my post for lots more details, and how I fixed some things.
Hope this helps you out.

[Powerhouse]

Oh, I almost forgot something. If you have multiple Genre's, or Featuring Artists, you need to split them up like the following...

<musicvideo>
<title>California Gurls</title>
<artist>Katy Perry</artist>
<artist>Snoop Dogg</artist>
<album>Teenage Dream</album>
<genre>Disco-Pop</genre>
<genre>Funk-Pop</genre>
<director></director>
<composer></composer>
<studio>Capitol</studio>
<year>2010</year>
<track>3</track>
<runtime>3:56</runtime>
</musicvideo>

Adding a " / " or " , " doesn't work (even if you define this in the "Advanced Settings" file), so they need to be split up like the above.

[MadClicker]

I'm following this thread closely, now that there's some real life in it.

I'm working on the media manager module for my web app, and am starting on the music furctions.

I agree with the approach to getting a general overview of the matadata. There's no better way to see the general health than that. I'm accessing the data directly from the xbmc db to start. I figure if it's not in the db it won't make it to the screen.

Here's my movie db overview:



Here's mt tv show db overview:



I'll do the same now for album artists, albums and music vids.

I have my movie scraper working as well as any out there.

Sickbeard scapes tv shows as well as I could make, so I'll keep using it for now.

I have last.fm, fanart.tv and discogs api keys. Still waiting for the tadb key...I guess I'm invisible.

I expect to get to the music scraping in a couple days.

[bsoriano]

@Powerhouse, To be completely honest I haven't even thought about the best way to approach compilations. I would love to hear ideas from everyone on the best way they would approach it. I believe I used to just have an artist called 'Various Artists' and 'Soundtracks' and set the album artist to one of those and just use generic musical related backdrops. Definitely need some ideas on that one.

A quick update on Symphony. I have spent the week bug fixing and putting in some additional error handling with plans to upload another update today but have decided to wait until I implement one more feature which I find to be critical.

At the moment I am going through and scraping data for all my music at the same time as developing the app, figuring it's the best way to catch bugs and much needed features. Spending quite a bit of time scraping info I became incredibly fustrated having to go into each album to find out if metadata was missing. It was driving me absolutely insane, so with that in mind I've almost finished work on adding metadata icons (ticks and crosses like in the artist list) for the albums list, so at a glance you can see what is missing. I've also added an extra check in the artist list which, if all metadata is present for all albums for that artist, it will be ticked, if not it will be a a cross, so you can also see which artists need attention without going into each of them in succession.

This brought up an interesting dilemma with the NFO's, and on what I consinder to qualify as a complete. I wrestled with this for a bit as all my albums differ on whether they have 'instruments' or 'moods' listed, 'disbanded' and 'died' dates which proved disasterous when implementing the above feature, and I know that everyone here will have a different idea aswell. I'm going to release an update on Monday that will have this feature and for an album to qualify as complete it will need a Title, Year and Description.

Now I know everyone will have a different idea on the qualifications for 'complete', so I will be adding the ability to specify which fields are needed to qualify as 'complete'. Unfortunately this won't be in Monday's update as there is a few things ahead of it in the queue but it's coming.

Again, I would love to hear how everyone handles Soundtracks and Compilations so I can begin mapping out support for them.

Also, I would love to know the folder structure you guys use for music videos. Personally I have a top level Music Videos folder with a subfolder for each artist, then all Music Videos together in the artist folder, like so:

- Music Videos
--- Artist1
-------- artist-song1.mp4
-------- artist-song1-thumb.jpg
-------- artist-song1.nfo
-------- artist-song2.mp4
-------- artist-song2-thumb.jpg
-------- artist-song2.mp3
--- Artist2
-------- artist-song1.mp4
-------- artist-song1-thumb.jpg
-------- artist-song1.nfo
-------- artist-song2.mp4
-------- artist-song2-thumb.jpg
-------- artist-song2.nfo
....


I would love to know what everyone else uses so I can account for it.

Anyway, thanks again for all the support, It really makes developing this app worth while.

Ethyria,

I have a large collection (130k+ tracks), with a lot of compilation and soundtrack albums. I manage my collection with J River Media Center, which is great, but does not write NFO files for artists or albums, so I am very eager to try Symphony. Thank you for making your work available to us!

In terms of compilations, what I have done is have a folder called "Assorted" that houses all compilation albums, and they all have the Album Artist ID3 tag populated with "(Multiple Artists)", and each track has the Artist ID3 tag populated with the artist for that particular track. This has worked well for me so far. My folder structure is as you mention (Artist/Album/Tracks), except that instead of Artist, I use Album Artist. In the case of compilations, the folder is "Assorted", and underneath a folder for each album. This is fine for me since it is understood well by J River Media Center.

As for Music Videos, my folder structure is like yours, except that each video is named "Artist - Song" (with a space before and after the dash).

Again, thanks for sharing and I will start testing your app today!

Regards,

Bart

[wgstarks]

Ethyria
Perhaps it's time to start a new thread with this now that you have released an early version. Would probably attract more notice. IMO you should also consider a donation link. I believe many people would be willing to contribute.

[MadClicker]

I got the basic of the album artist and album db views working:

Album artists:



Albums:



Not really a surpise how poorly the built in scrapers do.

I guess I'll start working on the artist scraper. At least I have the mbid.

[zag]

MadClicker looks great but can you start a dedicated thread?

[Ethyria]

I've uploaded a new version of Symphony for you all to have a play with, as I mentioned the other day it has quite a few bug fixes and a very basic ability to see if any album metadata is missing:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/njk3kna3ye1rak...4.zip?dl=0

Let me know if there are any problems

[punky.mtp]

I've uploaded a new version of Symphony for you all to have a play with, as I mentioned the other day it has quite a few bug fixes and a very basic ability to see if any album metadata is missing:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/njk3kna3ye1rak...4.zip?dl=0

Let me know if there are any problems

Just stop working immediatly after launch

[Ethyria]

Thanks for letting me know. Stick with the first and I'll get a working version up tomorrow, apologies.

[sveni_lee]

I just had a short try here at work... and it works...
So no errors here... I will try today evening with my database at home...