[DaveBlake]

Kodi devs have limited time and I do not think that music artworks could have a place in Kodi 18 roadmap (or, as for movies, just a few of them will be available through kodi core and we will still need SHS for the others)

That is why I thought simplier to make small correction to SHS than trying to add all of these in Kodi

You are of course right about limited time and help with deveolpment is welcome, the active dev team is very small compared to the millions of users Kodi has. But to my knowledge there is no "roadmap" it is just a matter of what gets done (implemented and approved) in time.

While I am not going to be able to replace SHS, and not sure I would even want to try, I am working on where Kodi looks for artist nfo and art. The current approach - trying to identify a unique folder in the music files - is flawed. It can only work for abum artists with very simple muisc folder layouts, collaborations (multiple album artists) or multiple music sources confuse it. In v18 there will be a nominated artists folder, and it would be sensible for addons that fetch art to use this folder too, not go off and create yet another structure with different naming etc.

I don't have time to trawl through Python and work out how these addons work, and I am not even a regular addon user, so I am unclear on what addons like SHS need to be able to make use of the features I am adding. All I can do is raise awareness of what I am working on, and hope that those on the addon side of things will come forward and work with me.

For example if there are issues with turning artist names into folders, then it would help me to know about it and to work together to come up with a collective solution that can be implemented in core and accessed by addons.

The v18 music db already holds Muisicbrainz release group id. It is this, not Muisicbrainz (album) release id, that is needed for online lookup of album art and info. Using this would speed up art retrieval by removing the need to requery Muiscbrainz (throttled to 1 call per sec), but I need to know what needs adding so that SHS and other addons have access to this.

Sounds very interesting. Is there a PR for this?

Not quite but near, the work is in my repo. I am working on it as part of improving the music library export/import facility. The aim is to reduce the number of times users rescrape the same online information. If we continue to unnecessarily batter the servers of the free online music info services they will eventually either fail or limit Kodi's access. Better export/import will mean that users can save scraped data locally and restore it to any fresh installations with ease.

I know that core changes are slow compared to addon development, but I would like to work with the addon devs and users rather than in isolation.

Some design and testing discussion here https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...pid2644241 Perhaps a better place to discuss it than mixed in with other SHS requests?