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I think some of this is already possible but you need to use a skin that supports the info you want to see, and I don't know if any actually do so right now.
Certainly from your screenshots, the 'years active' is skin specific, as are 'styles' and 'moods' and the playlist on the right.
If you are tagging your files with musicbrainz id's then Kodi will already scrape any artist info that's available into it's database. You just need a skinner that's interested in music to design a skin that pulls out all that info, or you could edit your current skin to show the info you require.
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hawsey
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Thanks for the reply :-) food for thought , have you any idea which skins might be designed for or better for music ?
For music nuts there is stacks of extra info on things like discogs that would be of interest .
Once I find a suitable skin I'll post another thread on the skin topic .
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AFAIK no skins are particularly music orientated, but do let us know if you find one you like. Generally Confluence, and in 17 Estuary, the system default will aim to display all the available data whereas other skins may not have kept up.
Any skin is limited to the "info labels" for data Kodi core provides to the skin for a given context. So the data you want for an album has to be stored in the library and have an info label to display it, and then the skin must use that info label.
What does Kodi store for albums?
Title, artists, (song) genres, year, moods, styles, themes, review (desc), label, rating, user rating and votes.
For artists it has fborn, formed, died, disbanded dates as appropriate amongst others like instruments etc.
Kodi 17 music library has song session musicicans and instruments if that metadata is included in the music file tags.
Not sure if this is all the data you want, but most of it. So it is just a matter of getting a skin that shows it.
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hawsey
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That's great , it sounds like if I use Estuary and put the stuff in an nfo it might work as I want :-)
Last time I tried and gave up was about 2 years ago .
Cheers
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Maybe, or maybe not.... Reading again it sounds like you want to see both current album and artist info together on the screen while a song is playing. I can understand why you may want it, but AFAIK no skins can do that. Instead there is an info dialog screen that shows either artist, album or song info depending on the context upon which it is displayed. For currently playing song you just get artwork (automatically), but no more data.
Kodi has the data, but displaying when you want it is another matter.
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Key to good data from discogs or elsewhere is to get proper tags in your music files. The value-added from artist and album scraping then supplements what is in the tag data. As stated, what gets shown is dependent on the skin. Aeon MQ5 Jarvismod (and Kryptonmod in dev) is great for music, but then I may be a bit biased. There are other mods for MQ5 and MQ6 that treat music a bit differently, and I suppose Aeon Nox and variants, Transparency! and Arctic (among others) all have there own styles.
Also, a popular add-on is "artist slideshow" which (via skinning) can display additional elements for playing music.
As far as displaying data, I think there is a trade-off of showing data or showing various artwork. Different users have different ideas about the right balance. Kodi supplies a "musicinfo" dialog which is an overlay for full-screen music (which Kodi calls "visualisation")
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hawsey
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Guys , thanks so much for the reples .
I would be happy with being able to toggle the info on and off , also on the one I show , things like Styles/moods don't interest me but maybe others like them .
Important info like the actual band members or recording studio and maybe session musicians etc used in the recording would be great .
So how would I go about scraping the info from discogs and displaying it in day Aeon MQ5 ?
Cheers.
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