[Dumyat]

I'm currently updating my Music Artist Information Dialog on Estuary and was looking for additional info to include. As interesting as when an artist was born or formed, I was rather hoping to include things more specific about their career and achievements, such as:-

Artist Rating
Total #1 Singles (By country if poss)
Awards (Number of Grammy's, platinum and gold discs)
Total Albums Released (Not just what you have in your Kodi Library)
Total Number of Global Record Sales

I thought this would be quite relevant and interesting information to include on this screen, so was quite surprised that no info labels seem to exist for this data. Is this because the information is not actually collected from the music sites Kodi scrapes it's data from? Or is it because the information just does not exist or is maybe too varied and changeable? 
I was also hoping to add a couple of new buttons at the bottom of the screen to allow a user to move forward/backwards to the next/previous artist via this screen and same when viewing a particularly album. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a Kodi ID available for next/previous Artist or next/previous Album, so not sure if this is actually possible.
Maybe somebody has a good idea how I could implement this feature?

[DaveBlake]

Is this because the information is not actually collected from the music sites Kodi scrapes it's data from?

No, this information is not currently scraped or held in the music library (hence no info label). I'm not even sure if it is info that the remote sites provide. If they do, and a scraper was edited/created that fetched it then it is not too hard to modify the music library to hold it and add info labels etc., but what data matters to some users doesn't matter to others so it is hard to prioritise this kind of thing. Hence if the data exists and could be fetched and someone wanted do change Kodi core to deal with it I would mentor them, but it is not a task I and going to take on myself.

I was also hoping to add a couple of new buttons at the bottom of the screen to allow a user to move forward/backwards to the next/previous artist via this screen and same when viewing a particularly album. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a Kodi ID available for next/previous Artist or next/previous Album, so not sure if this is actually possible.
Maybe somebody has a good idea how I could implement this feature?

No that just isn't how the info dialog was designed to work.
Sounds like what you want is the artist/album info for current item on a song/album item list so could be shown for the current item on the library nav screen. This is almost available via ListItem.Property(artist_mood) etc. but there is a bug that means the data is only there for certain navigation/use routes and not others, which I hope to fix for v19.

[Dumyat]

Hi Dave,
Thanks for the feedback. No worries.
When I looked on the sites we scrape from a while back I couldn't see any of this info either, which did surprise me a bit. But like you say, maybe that kind of info isn't particularly important to most users, so most likely that's why it isn't collected. 
Yeah, I am a bit of a knowledge junkie when it comes to facts, so being able to move forward/back from artist info screen would have been bliss and very handy (well, at least for somebody who likes reading this kind of stuff  ) …..But again, no worries.
I had made some changes to the general layout on this screen already, but I now have a clearer idea of what's possible and what's not.
Cheers

[mardukL]

Hi Dave,
Thanks for the feedback. No worries.
When I looked on the sites we scrape from a while back I couldn't see any of this info either, which did surprise me a bit. But like you say, maybe that kind of info isn't particularly important to most users, so most likely that's why it isn't collected. 
Yeah, I am a bit of a knowledge junkie when it comes to facts, so being able to move forward/back from artist info screen would have been bliss and very handy (well, at least for somebody who likes reading this kind of stuff  ) …..But again, no worries.
I had made some changes to the general layout on this screen already, but I now have a clearer idea of what's possible and what's not.
Cheers

Here are some examples to put in info, some are not set in stock estuary

https://kodi.wiki/view/InfoLabels#ListItem


" forward/back to another artist will not work in that case"

if ypu edit a skin file always
!! backup your file, in case of skin update, your changes will be overwritten.

here is an video example, how i do it.
(still not all info, but the important)

https://streamable.com/49vhq

[Dumyat]

 

here is an video example, how i do it.
(still not all info, but the important)

https://streamable.com/49vhq   

Thanks very much. Your skin mod is looking good. 
Yeah, I had checked out the info label page previously.
Maybe I can do something with the existing music view types in Estuary, or even make a new one.
Cheers

[DaveBlake]

Probably worth adding yes the Estuary version of the music info dialogs has always been poor (much of the aviallable data isn't shown). However work is being done to improve  it see https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/16682

[HeresJohnny]

Maybe a simple link to an artist's Wikipedia entry could be added? No sense in duplicating all that info and a possible copyright trap as well...

[Dumyat]

Maybe a simple link to an artist's Wikipedia entry could be added? No sense in duplicating all that info and a possible copyright trap as well...

Good idea, but I'll probably stick with the info that's available from sites we already scrape from.

[Dumyat]

Probably worth adding yes the Estuary version of the music info dialogs has always been poor (much of the aviallable data isn't shown). However work is being done to improve  it see https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/16682

The original idea for my own Estuary skin Mod was to focus purely on the PVR side of things. I updated the PVR Info screen in line with the what the same screen looks like for the Movie and TV show info screens, as I wanted to keep that same common theme going across the skin. Once I did that, I guess it was only natural to do the same thing for Music Artist/Album screens. Looks like my effort is quite similar to the PR link you posted:-


Looks like no info label though for Artist Rating, so will probably have to ditch that.

This is the kind of basic idea I had for the awards and records sales, but after filling the screen with some dummy info I didn't really like look anyway, so I'm not overly bothered the info isn't available. Sometimes too much info can be over bearing on the eyes:-



Still not even sure about using a banner in the top left, so things may change again.... 
Oh, while I think of it, you will notice on the top image there's a 'Formed' label on the right hand side. The label is available in Kodi and perfectly suited for bands/groups, but for Solo Artists, I thought it sounded a bit odd which I why I manually changed it on the 2nd image to 'Debut'. Is there a way to differentiate automatically, or would that need some kind of change in Kodi core?

[DaveBlake]

No, there is no rating data currently held for artists.

Oh, while I think of it, you will notice on the top image there's a 'Formed' label on the right hand side. The label is available in Kodi and perfectly suited for bands/groups, but for Solo Artists, I thought it sounded a bit odd which I why I manually changed it on the 2nd image to 'Debut'. Is there a way to differentiate automatically, or would that need some kind of change in Kodi core? 

Currently there is born, formed, died and disbanded fields in the artist table and matching info labels, all strings because the scrapers seem to rarely return dates for these, often a place and partial date, or maybe a full year. Nor is there any certainty that solo artists will only have born/died values and groups formed/disbanded values, but generally it is only one or the other that gets data.

The artist table now has a type field, which could contain anything you put in an artist.nfo but the scraper can get values "group", "person", "choir", "orchestra" and "other" from the Musicbrainz site. Perhaps you can check that value in the skin and use it to decide what info label to use, or how to label the info label.

Unfortunately artists type, born, formed, died and disbanded data isn't provided consistently enough for it to make sense for core code to do anything clever with it. I have been thinking it could make sense to combine the dates into just two fields in the artist table - born_formed, died_disbanded -and probably for backwards compatibility return born_formed value for both "born" and "formed" info lables etc. Although this would probably result in value being shown twice on most skins, so maybe better to just deprecate the info labels?

[beatmasterrs]

Probably worth adding yes the Estuary version of the music info dialogs has always been poor (much of the aviallable data isn't shown). However work is being done to improve  it see https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/16682

 

I can't contribute anything to the topic, but the screenshots look great!