[WilliamMinix]

Would it be possible to add a button/shortcut to the interface to retrieve 'Information'/Fanart about an artist when playing music?

The case is when I am playing music and the album/artist art is missing I have to click many times to go out of the 'Currently playing' screen for going to the list of artists and there go to the artist name that is currently playing, click there the right mouse button to retrieve the album/artist information. Having more than 6.000 artists it takes rather a long time and lots of clicks to get there. When doing so the first time in a session the focus is set to the first Artist. When doing again later on, the focus is to the latest selected artist. For some reason I then always need to go an artist whom is ~ 3.000 artists away.

Getting all the information for all artists in one go is no solution, because many artists have multiple entries in the db and nothing is then returned. 
It would be very convenient if there was some short cut button that I could immediately query for the missing fanart.

I am using Kodi 17.6 Estuary on Windows 10 and on Android 6.

[DaveBlake]

I have spit this into a thread of its own because the art enhancements thread is way too long already, and because this is more a general navigation issue. Also there is a use question burried in it which I didn't want to get lost.

Would it be possible to add a button/shortcut to the interface to retrieve 'Information'/Fanart about an artist when playing music?

Personally I think access to artist and album info for a song (currently playing or from any list of songs) is a nice idea. I would add that to the context menu, but I know that other team members think that it already has too many items on it and is cluttered. But it is something that a skin could do (I think - skinners correct me).

But your use case is to set art related to the playing item, and as you may note the thread this was posted to discusses the technical difficulties I am having getting updated art to show on the current playlist. OSD updates no problem, but the internal playlist causes the old art to display. So this is tricky, because I assume you would want to see the changes you are making immmediately.


But why you describe wanting this feature makes me think I can offer some more immedite help and advise.

Getting all the information for all artists in one go is no solution, because many artists have multiple entries in the db and nothing is then returned. 

One way or another that sounds like a tagging  issue. Which db has muiltiple entries?
If the issue is lack of artist uniqueness then the soluton is to tag your music with Musicbrainz IDs. But I doubt this is the issue because despite artist name not being unique few users have many name duplicates within their music collection. I have two in mine - John Williams and Martin Taylor - but many people have no duplicates at all.

The other, more likely possibility, is that your tagging results in artists called "artist1", "artist1 with artist2", "artist1 (feat. artist2)" etc., the list of song artists (if you show them rather than hide them and just list album artists) is mess, and the scraper can't look up individual automatically with mixed names.

Is that what you experience?? If so then the whole thing can be improved by some tagging (and or setting) changes. I have posted on this in various threads, and I'm sure there is wiki on it too. But I am guessing just based on one sentence, so maybe I have misunderstood?

Adding Muiscbrainz ID tags will greatly improve scraper accuracy and efficiency (only one lookup per artist not two), but it is optional of course.

Anyway do give some more information about how your music is tagged, and what you experience, and I suspect that you can get much better automated scraping results.

[Angelinas]

Would it be possible to add a button/shortcut to the interface to retrieve 'Information'/Fanart about an artist when playing music?

Personally I think access to artist and album info for a song (currently playing or from any list of songs) is a nice idea. I would add that to the context menu, but I know that other team members think that it already has too many items on it and is cluttered. But it is something that a skin could do (I think - skinners correct me).

"DaveBlake"  If you remember I sugested to add in Marcel Shs
https://github.com/marcelveldt/script.mo...ls/pull/10

Code:

Player.artistid

Here skiner can use too in visualisaton - song level ...
In DialogContextMenu.xml or DialogButtonMenu.xml I try second and is working ok

Code:

                    <item id="15">
                        <!-- Music Library -->
                        <label>Browse library for playing song</label>
                        <onclick>Dialog.Close(all,true)</onclick>
                        <onclick>ActivateWindow(music,musicdb://artists/$INFO[Window(Home).Property(SkinHelper.Player.artistid)]/)</onclick>
                        <visible>Window.IsActive(Visualisation)</visible>
                    </item>

You need to add in Kodi

Code:

MusicPlayer.Property(Artist_Id)

When I hit button, close all dialog and go direct in now playing Artist folder

[scott967]

My thought would be to go to the musicplaylist from visualisation.  It would be nice if there was a way to force focus to the current playing item in the container.  Then open song info from there.  If song info could provide a control that opens a select dialog with all contributors on the song, and user selects one that opens the artist info for that contributor.

scott s.
.

[Silki]

Like this :

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=264870

[WilliamMinix]

Hi DaveBlake, thanks for your elaborate answer.

I am using MediaMonkey 4.1.20 for tagging my flac files and I am using the standard scrapers: Universal Artist and Album Scraper. When I e.g. select the group 'Air' for retrieving info/art, I get the next list:

[DaveBlake]

Hope I didn't confuse you.

So your "Getting all the information for all artists in one go is no solution, because many artists have multiple entries in the db and nothing is then returned" comment was from experiencing the scraper finding multiple artists with the same name in the Musicbrainz database, for example 100 artists with a name like "Air". Artist name is far from unique, and matching by name alone inaccurate. In v18 the scraper can also show disambiguation text to help you recognise the artist, but it still manual and  tedious.

There are two routes you can take to unleash the awsome beauty of having all your artists have art automatically:

a) Add MusicbrainzID tags to your music files. Do this using Picard, or another tag editor like Mp3tag with a Musicbrainz lookup plugin. The artist scraper than uses these ids to get the art and info for exactly the right artist or album, accurate and efficient (one less data request per item).

or

b) Create folders for every artist. In v17 these have to contain all the music by that artist, and only that artist (something that isn't always possible), in v18 this can be in a separate location away from the music files, and only the folder names matter. Then create art (and maybe NFO files) for each

Of course with a) there still may not be art for every artist at fanart.tv or TADB but you could be community spirited and add it, otherwise the solution is b) or manual selection (which I know your original request wants to make easier).

[WilliamMinix]

Hi Dave, you did not :-). However, having > 6.000 artists and ~ 5.000 albums, I prefer to wait for that handy shortcut button to jump directly to the concerning artist to retrieve the information. To retag that number of album/artists will cost me too much time. And for now the tags done via MediMonkey work pretty well.
I also doubt that the mp3 tagging will work on my flac files (and yes, it is about 1.8 TB on a NAS server).

[Powerhouse]

I feel your pain @WilliamMinix (it took me several months to re-tag all my music switching from MediaMonkey to MusicBrainz Picard), best to just start using MusicBrainz Picard to tag your Music correctly to use with Kodi (and every other music player out there as well). And yes, MusicBrainz Picard can tag flac files as well.

Also, if you feel Tagging will be tough on your large collection, wait until you need to mess with Music Artwork. Without MusicBrainz tagging, your going to see all kinds of issues in Kodi.

[scott967]

Hi Dave, you did not :-). However, having > 6.000 artists and ~ 5.000 albums, I prefer to wait for that handy shortcut button to jump directly to the concerning artist to retrieve the information. To retag that number of album/artists will cost me too much time. And for now the tags done via MediMonkey work pretty well.
I also doubt that the mp3 tagging will work on my flac files (and yes, it is about 1.8 TB on a NAS server).

 The Discogs script / extension for MediaMonkey does allow using Musicbrainz as the data source for pulling tags from online sources.  However it doesn't currently pull the Musicbrainz IDs.  That could be done and added to the MediaMonkey custom1-custom4 library fields (and mapped to appropriate tags in all the tag specs).

MP3Tag (despite its name) tags all formats.  In the most recent release a library capability was added so from a tag-management perspective, it is now more equivalent to MediaMonkey.  Of course, MM has player, mobile device sync, playlist generation, and other capabiliities MP3tag will never have.

scott s.
.