Leia Deleted My NFO FIles!
#16
(2019-07-11, 17:47)hurricane51 Wrote:
(2019-07-11, 15:44)DaveBlake Wrote: Giving you choices is obviously too much, so I'll pick one.

Set the Artist Information Folder (in Settings > Media > Music) to "Y:\Music", then do a "To Library Folders" type export. Select "Albums, Album Artists" as the items to export and ensure that "Overwrite existing files" is disabled, as shown in screenshot in my previous post..

Thanks. I'm OK with choices, but both options were given to provide the same results as in the previous version. That seemed odd, so I wanted to confirm. Again, thanks for helping.  
I performed the Export, but it didn't generate any album.nfo files, even though I have Albums, Album artist selected. I did a library update then tried again, but no luck. Is there something else I have to set?
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#17
Have those albums been scraped (fetched additional info ffrom online siites)? Export to library folders (if that is the type of expirt you did) only exports artist or albums that have additional information to export.
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#18
(2019-07-11, 19:31)DaveBlake Wrote: Have those albums been scraped (fetched additional info ffrom online siites)? Export to library folders (if that is the type of expirt you did) only exports artist or albums that have additional information to export.

Yes, they are scraped. I've been doing this for 8 versions of KODI. Just like I never overwrite files. Never change the settings in the Export, not for Music, not for Videos.

Just to make it clear, this was all working perfectly under Krypton -- I've changed nothing except the KODI version. The artist.nfo and album.nfo were created correctly. I just restored the nfo files from my backup of 1-April (exported from Krypton). 100% of the artist.nfo files and about 90% of the album.nfo files are restored. I'm really glad I created those backups.

NOTE: Exactly 56 album.nfo files were created when I performed the Library folder export (out of 1200 albums). All the artist.nfo files were created. However, I have not compared the contents of the backed up files.
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#19
(2019-07-11, 19:47)hurricane51 Wrote:
(2019-07-11, 19:31)DaveBlake Wrote: Have those albums been scraped (fetched additional info ffrom online siites)? Export to library folders (if that is the type of expirt you did) only exports artist or albums that have additional information to export.

Yes, they are scraped. I've been doing this for 8 versions of KODI. Just like I never overwrite files. Never change the settings in the Export, not for Music, not for Videos.

Just to make it clear, this was all working perfectly under Krypton -- I've changed nothing except the KODI version. The artist.nfo and album.nfo were created correctly. I just restored the nfo files from my backup of 1-April (exported from Krypton). 100% of the artist.nfo files and about 90% of the album.nfo files are restored. I'm really glad I created those backups.

NOTE: Exactly 56 album.nfo files were created when I performed the Library folder export (out of 1200 albums). All the artist.nfo files were created. However, I have not compared the contents of the backed up files.  
OK, I've done a lot of testing and I'll live with the lack of album.nfo files. I imagine over the years I accumulated files from other scrapers than my current setting, which is Universal Album Scraper. The album.nfo file doesn't contain much info, and sometimes is flat out wrong. The tag info is as much as I need, and that's Title, Artist, Album Artist, Album, Year, Track, Thumbnail. I don't care about Genre (wholly unreliable).

I've got the artist.nfo files. I did another test and they appear to be identical (at least in size) to the backups.

So...that seems to tie this up. Agreed? (I'm pretty sure you'll be happy to sign off.)
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#20
(2019-07-12, 04:33)hurricane51 Wrote: So...that seems to tie this up. Agreed? (I'm pretty sure you'll be happy to sign off.) 
I can only repeat that if you are getting unexpected behaviour then I am happy to pursue it with you, but it is up to you. If there is a bug then I want to find and fix it, but having repeatedly tested I can not reproduce any issues.

I am still confused by exactly what you are reporting - first artist NFO were "deleted" or "missing" but the files were actualy overwritten with different data (which is a totally different issue), now artist.nfo are fine but album nfo are "missing" (only getting 56 out of 1200 albums).

How are you accessing what album.nfo are produced by export? Do you not already have many album.nfo sitting there (previously restored from your backup) hence only 56 new ones created with overwrite disabled?
 
A look at your MyMusic72.db could be informative, post it on the cloud somewhere and PM me a link. That would be my next investigative step, but if you do not want to pursue this then that is fine too.
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#21
Just jumping in here as I've been following the thread with interest !

I exported my music library yesterday as an experiment - I've only added to it over the past few years, rather than sort it out properly again, but a bit more on that later Nod

I set it up to export separate artist and album nfo's and album art to a brand new share on a different server than the one that holds the actual music files. It created artist/album directories correctly, exported all the album info first and then artist info.  Once it had finished the album artists, it exported info for song artists.  All looks correct to me.

Anyway @DaveBlake , is there a 'best practice' method for moving from an artist/album structure to something better ?  I'd like to take advantage of all the work you have put in and split my music up differently in the future but the original library db was built probably with V15 and has only been upgraded through Kodi upgrades.  Everything is tagged with Picard and already has existing art and nfo files alongside the album tracks. Feel free to spin this off into a new thread if you feel it warrants it, or just point me to a link where you may have gone through all this before Big Grin

@hurricane51 , sorry for butting in bud, hope you get everything to your liking.
Learning Linux the hard way !!
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#22
@black_eagle thanks for the positive feedback on using export, I'm really at a loss over the issue @hurricane51 is reporting. Your question about best practice is a good one. I'll start a new thread to answer it fully and ping you.
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#23
Before this thread becomes a "whodunnit" based solely on self-reported user experiences, maybe we should fall back to the tried and true system of providing a log file to analyze the issue properly. Other users won't be able to benefit from guesswork alone.
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#24
There is minimal logging during export, this is is one case where a log is of no help in the investigation. If I thought it was useful I would have asked for one days ago.
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#25
Excuse us simple folk for trying to intervene on your behalf. Of course, as the programmer you would also know best when to implement logging in the code.
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#26
(2019-07-13, 14:57)HeresJohnny Wrote: Excuse us simple folk for trying to intervene on your behalf. Of course, as the programmer you would also know best when to implement logging in the code.

What do you log though ? Every successful artist.nfo created followed by every album.nfo created ?  Or do you log failed writes, or artists/albums that have no info to export ?

Probably if I was going to log anything, it'd be the latter.  IE, no info to export for X.  However, one also has to consider that logging necessarily introduces more overheads and that as my export to separate files took over two hours to complete I'd probably not want to do it with debugging turned on.  If it could be moved to a background thread, then maybe it's something I'd consider, but I have no clue if that's either possible, desirable or of how much impact it may have on other areas of Kodi.  Certainly, if doing it in the background, one would have to block library updates, refreshes etc so it may well be more trouble than it's worth.

Also, my Kodi instances run for months at a time without restarting.  I generally have logging turned off completely for them as otherwise the logs just get ridiculously big (even without debug turned on).  Reproducing the issue with debug enabled may not even be possible, depending upon how/why it occurred in the first place.  However, if the OP is able to reproduce the issue then I'm sure Dave would do his utmost to help.

In a lot of cases (and I'm not suggesting for a second that this is the case here!), users mis-understand settings or expect a certain result and when that doesn't happen, blame the program they are using, irrespective of the fact (which most likely, they are not aware of) that they have configured something incorrectly.  I see this all the time in my 'day-job'.
Learning Linux the hard way !!
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#27
(2019-07-12, 10:44)DaveBlake Wrote:
(2019-07-12, 04:33)hurricane51 Wrote: So...that seems to tie this up. Agreed? (I'm pretty sure you'll be happy to sign off.) 
I can only repeat that if you are getting unexpected behaviour then I am happy to pursue it with you, but it is up to you. If there is a bug then I want to find and fix it, but having repeatedly tested I can not reproduce any issues.

I am still confused by exactly what you are reporting - first artist NFO were "deleted" or "missing" but the files were actualy overwritten with different data (which is a totally different issue), now artist.nfo are fine but album nfo are "missing" (only getting 56 out of 1200 albums).

How are you accessing what album.nfo are produced by export? Do you not already have many album.nfo sitting there (previously restored from your backup) hence only 56 new ones created with overwrite disabled?
 
A look at your MyMusic72.db could be informative, post it on the cloud somewhere and PM me a link. That would be my next investigative step, but if you do not want to pursue this then that is fine too. 
Sorry to take so long to respond.

As a test, I deleted all of the NFO files in my library, since I had a backup. I ran an export and KODI only created 56 album.nfo files. Now, all albums do not generate album.nfo files, but in my backups I have about 350 album.nfo files.

I'll watch what happens in subsequent exports, but it's the artist.nfo files I'm most concerned with and that's straightened out. Tagging the media files pretty much takes care of the info that the album.nfo files contain.

That's when I meant with "that seems to tie this up". And that's my feeling. But I learned a lot from this thread and I appreciate the help provided by everyone who contributed.
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#28
I suspect if you want to take this any further you'll have to share your database file so Dave can see if there's any differences between the albums that do produce an album.nfo and those which don't that would account for this . If you are willing to do this then upload to a file share service (Google Drive/Dropbox or similar) and post a link here, however if you do not want this public then after doing Post Reply and it appears on forum, immediately edit the post to remove the link so it is no longer displayed, as the Team has access to the post edit history Dave will be able to extract the URL from there.
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#29
So @hurricane51 your remaining issue is that export is creating 56 album.nfo files, and from your backups you think there should be 350 of them.
An examination of your MyMusic72.db files would tell me if this behaviour is as expected or not, and I admit I am mildly curious. So if you would like to provide me with a copy of it as described in the above post then I will take  a look. But if you don't want to do that then that is fine and I will consider this matter closed.
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