[pkscout]

I was under the impression that AS also provided the album covers for the discography feature, maybe not then?
This is how Beach Boys looks with the missing cover images and they just show a music note etc.

AS provides URLs to album images, but it's up to the skin as to whether those are used. AS gets those URLs from one of two places, either theaudiodb.com or last.fm. It is possible that when last.fm shutdown the ability to request artist images it also shutdown the ability to get album artwork too. So if the album art isn't on theaudiodb.com, then AS may not be able to provide that URL.

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Question: am I correct in thinking that AS won't create an extrafanart sub-folder under the artists folder if one is not there already? (On your NAS / FileServer).

I just added a new artist in to my music library and played it in XBMC. AS did display one fanart image OK (Cache locally on HTPC) Looking on Fanart.tv there is only one fanart image available so looks to be correct.

I then updated CDArtManager database and downloaded all new fanart images for album artists, this then created the extrafanart sub-folder under this new artist.
I then played this artist again and then this time AS did its thing and created the _exclusions.nfo file and added one .JPG image called 9e9edceb.jpg.

Just wondered if this is expected behaviour and that AS won't actually create the extrafanart sub-folder as CDArtManager does.
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You are correct. AS will not create the extrafanart directory for an artist. It will ADD to an existing one. So if there is no local artist match, AS will download the artwork to the cache in the addon_data folder. You can migrate images out of your cache into a local directory using Artist Slideshow Helper. That will even create new artist directories for you if you want.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Add...how_Helper

I haven't added the documentation to the wiki yet, but it is in the read me that you get when you download the addon.