[DaveBlake]

Off you go then, any one is welcome to contribute to Kodi

I'd love to, but regretfully, I'm no longer a programmer. I used to program in assembly code and hex machine code back in the early 70's though :-)

That even predates me, and sometimes in the dev team I do feel like a grand father

Seriously there are many ways to contribute to Kodi, not only code. It always helps if you remember that the dev team is a small group of volunteers, that have more work to do than they have hours to do it. Right now I would be very greatful for someone to search through the forum and find all the user comments about music artist and album nfo files and import/export and come up with a summary of problems, requirements and ideas. Preferably quickly.

There is no forum for devs to ask for user help (inverse support!), so I'm using this one

[oyvindo]

Right now I would be very grateful for someone to search through the forum and find all the user comments about music artist and album nfo files and import/export and come up with a summary of problems, requirements and ideas. Preferably quickly.

That is a welcome request. I'll see what I can do....

[scott967]

Seriously there are many ways to contribute to Kodi, not only code. It always helps if you remember that the dev team is a small group of volunteers, that have more work to do than they have hours to do it. Right now I would be very greatful for someone to search through the forum and find all the user comments about music artist and album nfo files and import/export and come up with a summary of problems, requirements and ideas. Preferably quickly.

There is no forum for devs to ask for user help (inverse support!), so I'm using this one

I think you know my opinion, but in short:

1. Export should allow to export artists, albums, or both.

2. It would be nice if export would allow for artist-name.nfo and album-name.nfo, though I don't know how to handle illegal file name (maybe standard "makelegalffilename" function) . But the database should add based on nfo file contents, not file name.

3. Single file export for artists will include <art></art> element containing currently assigned thumb and fanart (at least for local image files) but is ignored on import.

In light of the fact that music uses file meta-tags as main data source, I would consider getting rid of nfo file reading for music. Instead just use the music library import function. User can turn off online scraping during update.

scott s.
.

[jonnyp]

Off you go then, any one is welcome to contribute to Kodi

I'd love to, but regretfully, I'm no longer a programmer. I used to program in assembly code and hex machine code back in the early 70's though :-) 

That even predates me, and sometimes in the dev team I do feel like a grand father

Seriously there are many ways to contribute to Kodi, not only code. It always helps if you remember that the dev team is a small group of volunteers, that have more work to do than they have hours to do it. Right now I would be very greatful for someone to search through the forum and find all the user comments about music artist and album nfo files and import/export and come up with a summary of problems, requirements and ideas. Preferably quickly.

There is no forum for devs to ask for user help (inverse support!), so I'm using this one  

I know this is an old topic but will there ever be a solution to this conundrum? I don't know much about programming. But my idea would be for Kodi to create a separate global artist folder which contains artist and album artist nfos + artwork based on their Musicbrainz IDs and each nfo then links to all files where each artist and album artist Musicbrainz ID is tagged during scraping. I'm not sure it's feasible, but if it is, then it sounds like a big job to implement.

[DaveBlake]

know this is an old topic but will there ever be a solution to this conundrum? I don't know much about programming. But my idea would be for Kodi to create a separate global artist folder which contains artist and album artist nfos + artwork based on their Musicbrainz IDs and each nfo then links to all files where each artist and album artist Musicbrainz ID is tagged during scraping. I'm not sure it's feasible, but if it is, then it sounds like a big job to implement. 

Such an old topic that the answer is yes, there will be a solution in Leia  

I have yet to write up a user friendly introduction (lack of time again), but the current v18 nightly has the facility to load local art or NFO files for any artist. It was previously possible to scrape song artist art from online sources, but not use local art nor NFO files for additional artist info. Leia lets the user nominate an "Artist Information Folder", beneath which a unique folder can be created for each artist and art and nfo stored there. The export facility has also been improved so it will create the folder structure and populated it with the art and info that has been scraped online. This can then be manually edited etc.

The development of this is discussed https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=319284 if you like a good read.

When it comes to showing song artist art for compliations rather than a "various artists" image it may need a skins change too. I am doing some work on the JSON API relating to art https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=324170 that will probably help that.

For v17 there may be skins and adons combinations that delever some of these things already, but I am talking about Kodi doing this by default.

[jonnyp]

know this is an old topic but will there ever be a solution to this conundrum? I don't know much about programming. But my idea would be for Kodi to create a separate global artist folder which contains artist and album artist nfos + artwork based on their Musicbrainz IDs and each nfo then links to all files where each artist and album artist Musicbrainz ID is tagged during scraping. I'm not sure it's feasible, but if it is, then it sounds like a big job to implement. 

Such an old topic that the answer is yes, there will be a solution in Leia  

I have yet to write up a user friendly introduction (lack of time again), but the current v18 nightly has the facility to load local art or NFO files for any artist. It was previously possible to scrape song artist art from online sources, but not use local art nor NFO files for additional artist info. Leia lets the user nominate an "Artist Information Folder", beneath which a unique folder can be created for each artist and art and nfo stored there. The export facility has also been improved so it will create the folder structure and populated it with the art and info that has been scraped online. This can then be manually edited etc.

The development of this is discussed https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=319284 if you like a good read.

When it comes to showing song artist art for compliations rather than a "various artists" image it may need a skins change too. I am doing some work on the JSON API relating to art https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=324170 that will probably help that.

For v17 there may be skins and adons combinations that delever some of these things already, but I am talking about Kodi doing this by default.

Awesome news! Thanks so much for that Dave and all of your work!