[Dumyat]

With the recent music library changes being made in Kodi 18, could somebody confirm where CD artwork and Artist logos should now be placed, as I haven't been able to get my local artwork to work for a while now or by using Artwork Beef.
Thanks

[DaveBlake]

I can tell you about what core can do in v18, we will need @rmrector  to confirm where Artwork Beef is with those changes, and Skin Helper Service and the skin used may have a contribution too. If you are having trouble getting something to work it could well be that we just have not all caught up with each other.

Artists
I would recommend from v18 onwards keeping artist artwork (and nfo files) separate from your music files. This liberates you from trying to keep all music by an artist, and only that artist, all under a unique folder - there is music that just does not fit that hierarchy. Instead nominate an Artist Information Folder, and under that all the artist art can be stored with a folder for each artist. You can use the export facility to create the individual artist folders (correctly named) for you.

Kodi will pick up artist thumb and fanart from that nominated location automatically as part of scanning or scraping. Other art types, like logos or extra fanart, can be manually selected from the artist info dialog now. Otherwise they can also be added using appropriate addons or JSON API calls.

Albums
Local album art is still best placed with the music files themselves (putting all the music for an album in a folder, or subfolders beneath a unique folder, is an obvious way to organise music). Kodi only automatically finds album covers (thumbs), or cover art for parts of a boxed set release that has been put into subfolders. But you can manually add other types of art e.g. CD artwork (round images), inserts, spines and back covers etc.  from the album info dialog. Again addons could do this too.

I would encourage addon and skin authors to use a standard naming convention for this additional artist and album art, maybe there already is one I don't know. In the future core may be able to pick up more art types automatically from local folders, a consensus would help.

[Powerhouse]

Whoa, hold on a sec...

So is this directory structure no longer valid in v18 Kodi Leia

Artist\Extrafanart
Artist\Album 1
Artist\Album 1\Lyrics
Artist\Album 2
Artist 2\Extrafanart
Artist 2\Album 1
Artist 2\Album 2\Lyrics
Artist 2\Album 3

Where under Artist, you list the Artist.nfo, Folder.jpg, Fanart.jpg, logo.jpg, and all of that Artists albums listed in separate folders. As well as an Extrafanart folder (for add-on's like Artist Slideshow), and Lyrics folder under each album (for the CULyrics add-on)?

[DaveBlake]

No worrys @Powerhouse , for backwards compatibility v18 continues to support looking for local art from an Artist/Album folder structure, in fact it does so while avoiding many of the errors and issues that used to cause odd art in unexpected places. No doubt skins and addons will continue to use "Extrafanart" subfolders.

But for a robust and liberated future, that handles all the "corner issues" such as
a) music from an artist located across more than one music source
b) albums that are collaborations with more than one album artist e.g. composer, conductor, orchestra
c) art for artists that are not album artists
d) more than one artist with the same name e.g. John Williams (guitarist or composer of film music),
I hope that users (and addons) will move to using a nominated Artist Info Folder for artist art and NFO files.
It also keeps your music folders clear of clutter e.g. image files, and extra folders with just images that some addons create.

Then the albums can be under whatever folder structure a user likes to use, many will still use some kind of artist folders, but it could just as well be genre, or year or "my stuff", "kids stuff", "Party music" etc.

[Powerhouse]

Ok, I get what your saying. And I see a big fix going forward. Let me explain...

Currently in my Artist/Album structure, I've noticed that the add-on Artist-Slideshow will download additional artwork for additional artists that I don't have music for.

Example:
Katy Perry - E.T.  ft. Kanye West

Now I don't have any music from Kanye West, but the Artwork-Slideshow will create a Kanye West folder, and then download Kanye West fanart and place it under the Kanye West\Extrafanart folder. So in my large collection, I have hundreds of these extra folders that don't have music, but have the Extrafanart folder in them.

Having a centralized database of this Artist information, keeps my actual Music folder location clean, while still providing all the benefits of the current system. This seems similar to the Single folder location for all the Movie Sets artwork, using the "Movie Set Artwork Automator" add-on.

So I'm guessing you will post where this setting is located in Kodi 18 (so us newbs know what to look for).

[DaveBlake]

Kodi v18 will work with whatever folder structure you have for v17, but users will benefit in the long run from rearranging some of their local artist art and NFO files.

...
I've noticed that the add-on Artist-Slideshow will download additional artwork for additional artists that I don't have music for.

...Now I don't have any music from Kanye West, but the Artwork-Slideshow will create a Kanye West folder, and then download Kanye West fanart and place it under the Kanye West\Extrafanart folder. So in my large collection, I have hundreds of these extra folders that don't have music, but have the Extrafanart folder in them.

I don't use any of them but I know there are other addons that do similar to Artwork-Slideshow, mixing extra folders in with the music, or creating their own folders. My hope is that we can move to having one consistent place, using common naming for both folders and image files.
 

Having a centralized database of this Artist information, keeps my actual Music folder location clean, while still providing all the benefits of the current system. This seems similar to the Single folder location for all the Movie Sets artwork, using the "Movie Set Artwork Automator" add-on.

I don't know about the  "Movie Set Artwork Automator"  addon, but yes keeping your actual music folders clean is another benefit of the Artist Infomation Folder approach (thanks for the reminder I've added it to my post).
 

So I'm guessing you will post where this setting is located in Kodi 18 (so us newbs know what to look for).

I'm shy like that, do all this innovate  work and then hide it from users

The "Artist Information Folder" setting can be found under Settings > Media > Music, pick a location of your choice. You also get taken to set this, if you have not done so,  from the music Library Export facility - export to library folders will create all the artist folders and NFO files for you. Also the "Artist Information Folder" setting  can be changed from the convenient "Settings" button that is shown on the OK dialog that is after you add a music source, asking if you want to scan to library.

Seriously I do need help to get a user guide together, with screen shots and everything, or at least a music "what's new" tour. But I have so much more I want to get into alpha I don't have the time to do documentation.

[Dumyat]

@DaveBlake
Many thanks for the detailed reply.
My current config to date has been as follows:-

F:\Music (My Music Library)
Within this path I have individual artist folders, that currently contain:-
Local NFO file for Artist info.
folder.jpg (Artist thumb image)
fanart.jpg (Artist image)
logo.png (Artist)

Within each of my artist folders, I also have sub folders for the albums which contain:
Local NFO file for Album info.
Music file.MP3
folder.jpg (Album cover image)
cdart.png (Album CD image)

Is this still the correct configuration?
Over a period of time, I've found many items in my music collection have ended up with incorrect tags for one reason or another, so I'm slowly updating my entire collection and fixing these tags by using the MP3tag software and sourcing better album artwork, which I'm embedding to the MP3 file. It's quite a slow process and have been updating/adding a few artists/albums back into my Kodi library each week or when time allows.
After each update, I generally export my library in order that NFO files are created. This allows me to manually edit these NFO files where necessary if any data is missing (artist biography for instance because it does not exist using Kodi's scraper). 
So reading your reply, when exporting the library if you have set-up an artist information path (Which I have), do I really need to also keep the artist NFO files in the original artist folders in my current music library configuration? Also, if I have embedded the album cover artwork into the MP3 file, is there any need to continue having a folder.jpg in my album folder? When I last tried to add a few albums without a folder.jpg, but the cover artwork embedded into the file, the cover art did not show in Kodi, although that was a while ago so things may changed since then.
I've tried today to manually add/select a couple of cdart.png artworks from their current album folder location but are still not showing. I'm presuming this artwork type is called named cdart.png and not disc.png or something else? Or as you have said, this might just be down to all different changes not catching up with each other.

One final observation I've noticed is if artwork is enabled on the Universal artist scraper, any local artwork you might have in place seems to be ignored in favour of new artwork collected by the UAS. Rather annoyingly I only discovered this after reloading my exported library to Kodi and finding that a lot of my artist thumbs and fanart had changed and Kodi was not using my local artwork. After checking my NFO files, I discovered many URL's pointing to these new artworks. Is this how the UAS should work? I thought it would only add artwork if local artwork did not exist? I managed to fix most of these changes by manually selecting my local artwork and re-exporting the library with these changes, then reloading to Kodi, but with the UAS artwork options disabled. Maybe things have changed now, as I haven't had time to add any new and updated music to my Kodi library for 3/4 weeks. 

When I have a clearer understanding of all the new changes being made and how things should now be configured, I'd be happy to help out with a user guide, screen shots etc.

[jasn]

I have virtually the same Music folder format as dumyat summarized above.  In addition, however, I also have an "extrafanart" subfolder in each Artist folder containing scraped artist images from Mediaelch and/or cdaART Manager. (If this artwork exists at all and sometimes frustratingly creating duplicates between the two programs). I may take Dave's advice to create a self-standing folder for each artist with nfo's and artist-related graphics, but managing two locations gives me pause...

For about 300 of the ~2000 albums in my library I also have manually added a self-titled folder called Artwork to each album folder that includes a myriad of scanned images from the album, like front and back inserts, pages from scanned booklets, disk scans, etc.  It's this Artwork folder I am hoping to be able to access and scroll through when playing a particular album.  Just like if I had the vinyl or cd case. 

[scott967]

There are different issues that need to be sorted (SHS = skin.helper.service, AB = Artwork Beef, AS = Artist Slideshow)

1.  Name of extended art file.  AFAIK, SHS and AB have de-facto standard and are compatible.  This name is also used as the arttype attribute in the music database.  AS doesn't use extended art.

2.  Location of local extended art file.  AB can look either in the source folder tree OR the Artist info folder tree set in Kodi settings for artist extended art.  Not sure offhand about SHS but I think only the source folders.  AB and SHS both look in source folder tree for album extended art.

3.  Name of extra art file.  AB suggests using fanart1, fanart2, etc.  SHS and AS don't care.

4.  Location of local extra art.  SHS will look for "extrafanart" folder in the source folder tree.  AB recommends adding extrafanart as artist extended art so follows 2).  AS does its own management of location.  In the past it stored in its addon_data folder, but as of Ver 2 creates it's own artist folder tree.  (As a note, in the past there was companion addon AS Helper to move the extrafanart out of addon_data if user desired.)

5.  Skin use of extended art.  SHS provides window property infolabel for extended art.  AB does not provide property, instead skin gets using built-in Kodi infolabels.  Skins can also get extended art by looking directly for extended art files (where it looks is up to skin).

6.  Skin use of extra art.  SHS provides window property infolabel for extra art (extrafanart).  AB does not provide property, instead skin gets using built-in Kodi infolabels (AB suggests using non-standard arttype fanart2, fanart3, etc).  AS provides window property infolabel for extra art (extrafanart).  Skins can also get extra art by looking for extra art files (where it looks is up to skin but there is a de-facto convention of using "extrafanart" folder, the location of that folder is up to skin).

7.  Note that for skins property infolabels don't work within containers.

scott s.
.

[DaveBlake]

@Dumyat your file layout is the common way for v17 and before, and v18 will continue to support it. You ask if this this still the correct configuration, all I can say is that it is a reasonable arrangement but that it has limitations.

The most important one is that for the artist thumb and fanart to be picked up correctly the artist folder must contain all the music by that artist and only that artist. Is that the case for all your music?

Is your music collection is small enough that it does not have

• any albums with more than one album artist e.g. Classical music with composer, conductor and orchestra, or collaborabtions by pop artists like "Riding with the King" by B B King and Eric Clapton
  
• more than one artist with the same name e.g. John Williams (guitarist or composer of film music)
  
• music by same artist split across more than one music source
  

Providing your artist folders contain all the music by that artist and only that artist then that arrangement will work. But it will also mean that you can only store local art and have NFO files for album artists, those that only feature on songs or contribute other roles such as composer or mixer etc. will not have art.

In v18 you can avoid those limitations, and have art for all artists, by using a nominated Artist Info Folder for artist art and NFO files instead of mixing them into the music hierarchy. I can nudge users in that direction, but the choice is all yours.

I will add that the artist logo.png file is not handled by core Kodi. If you are seeing these then that is down to an addon and/or skin picking that up (or not). Likewise with album CDart.png.
 

Over a period of time, I've found many items in my music collection have ended up with incorrect tags for one reason or another, so I'm slowly updating my entire collection and fixing these tags by using the MP3tag software and sourcing better album artwork, which I'm embedding to the MP3 file.

Improving tagging is always a good thing to do.
BTW Kodi uses local album covers when they exist in preference to embedded art, so you could just put the better album art in folder.jpg rather than embed it in the mp3 file if that is easier for you. I do both out of habit, but there is particular reason to do it.
 

After each update, I generally export my library in order that NFO files are created. This allows me to manually edit these NFO files where necessary if any data is missing (artist biography for instance because it does not exist using Kodi's scraper). 
So reading your reply, when exporting the library if you have set-up an artist information path (Which I have), do I really need to also keep the artist NFO files in the original artist folders in my current music library configuration?

No, Kodi looks first in the Artist Information Folder so the one's mixed with the music are not being used.
 

Also, if I have embedded the album cover artwork into the MP3 file, is there any need to continue having a folder.jpg in my album folder? When I last tried to add a few albums without a folder.jpg, but the cover artwork embedded into the file, the cover art did not show in Kodi, although that was a while ago so things may changed since then.

There is no need as such, Kodi will pick up the album cover from within the music files, yet I would probably do this the other way around. And you say you had problems with embedded art before, while most people have problems seeing it when they don't want to. If you don't see embedded art it could be down to the tagging in someway, if you do repeat an issue of this them please let me know.

I've tried today to manually add/select a couple of cdart.png artworks from their current album folder location but are still not showing. I'm presuming this artwork type is called named cdart.png and not disc.png or something else? Or as you have said, this might just be down to all different changes not catching up with each other.

You need to understand what things are done by Kodi core and what things are addon provided functionality. In v18 from the album info dialog you can now manually manage any type of art - that is pick an image or even add a new art type - but that alone does not make the image appear on the UI. Many skins, including Estuary and Confluence only show album thumb (cover), and artist thumb and fanart. You can add what additional art you like, but it will not show. I would guess that in the past you have had the old CDart addon add cdart.png, and use a skin that shows it.
 

One final observation I've noticed is if artwork is enabled on the Universal artist scraper, any local artwork you might have in place seems to be ignored in favour of new artwork collected by the UAS. Rather annoyingly I only discovered this after reloading my exported library to Kodi and finding that a lot of my artist thumbs and fanart had changed and Kodi was not using my local artwork. After checking my NFO files, I discovered many URL's pointing to these new artworks. Is this how the UAS should work? I thought it would only add artwork if local artwork did not exist? I managed to fix most of these changes by manually selecting my local artwork and re-exporting the library with these changes, then reloading to Kodi, but with the UAS artwork options disabled.

Local art should always take precedence. The Universal Artist Scraper returns multiple URLs for possible artist art, these URLs get saved and exported, which is what you are seeing in the NFO file. On scraping only albums that do not have local art, or any embeded in the music files, get the first scraped art applied as the current thumb.

I will test what is happening with NFO files produced by export, and see if I can repeat your issue. You say "reloading my exported library", what exactly did you do? Can you post an example artist.NFO file that had that effect?

EDIT: Yeap, I can reproduce, scraping is replacing the artist art. This behaviour is a recently introduced bug, thanks for reporting it, a fix will be comming soon. But it seems that v17 had a related issue - refreshing from info dialog would clear artist thumb back to folder.jpg
 

When I have a clearer understanding of all the new changes being made and how things should now be configured, I'd be happy to help out with a user guide, screen shots etc.

Great, as the dev I am not the best to put things in user langauge.

[DaveBlake]

I have virtually the same Music folder format as dumyat summarized above....
I may take Dave's advice to create a self-standing folder for each artist with nfo's and artist-related graphics, but managing two locations gives me pause...

But why is this two locations, the artist stuff only needs to be one place?

Anyway if your music collection is such that it can be arranged with artist folders that contain all the music by that artist and only that artist, and you only want art and NFO for album artists, then stay with the layout you have. But just be very sure that you have got that artist unique folder arrangement.

Many users will benefit from being liberated from trying to squeezing their music collection into a strict artist layout - they have items that don't fit - but it is not compulsory. I know users need to see a benefit before they will move files, and that is fine.

Also, at the risk of causing confusion, if you only have one music source (and I would again encourage anyone with a larger music collection to split it into multiple sources) then you could nominate that as the Artist Information Folder. A bit of fiddling about with export to get the artist folder names as expected, and you will end up with some folders just containing art and no music files, but art and music together. Want a mixed layout and it can be.

For about 300 of the ~2000 albums in my library I also have manually added a self-titled folder called Artwork to each album folder that includes a myriad of scanned images from the album, like front and back inserts, pages from scanned booklets, disk scans, etc.  It's this Artwork folder I am hoping to be able to access and scroll through when playing a particular album.  Just like if I had the vinyl or cd case. 

As I posted elsewhere, I think with a few skin adjustments  and some more work to pick up each image manually from the Album Info dialog (or write a python script to automate it), with v18 you are nearer to seeing these.

[DaveBlake]

@scott967 thank you for the addon art location summary. I hope no one takes my general ignorance of addons as an insult, it is just a matter of focusing limited resources. There are many more addon devs than there are core devs, so my efforts are best spent on core.

I fear that Marcel is busy with other things at the moment, so unless someone else can take a look it could be a while before SHS makes use of the Artist Information Folder, and that is a shame. Also v18 makes all the art it knows about available to the skin, so if and addon (ArtworkBeef or something else?) sets the CDart or extra artist fanart etc. then there is no need for SHS to provide extra infolables.

But I could be confused...
 

7.  Note that for skins property infolabels don't work within containers. 

That sounds like something more my side, can you give me an example Scott. Be gentle, a mode to Confluence that shows the issue would be ideal.

[Dumyat]

@DaveBlake
Again, many thanks for the reply and apologies for all my questions.

Yeah, all my artist folders just contain music for that specific artist only. For collaborations, using 'When You're Gone' by Bryan Adams and featuring Mel C as an example, I would normally tag Bryan Adams as the artist and album artist, but show the song title as 'When You're Gone (Ft. Mel C). This is then shown in Kodi as Bryan Adams - When You're Gone (Ft Mel C). I've always found this method to be quite a useful way for displaying titles where there are collaborating artists.

With regard to CDart, I'm currently using a Mod of Estuary that I'm working on that suits my own taste. The original idea was to improve the PVR section, but after doing so I found that the OSD looked a little bare for my liking, so I made some additional changes there also, which included music playback. I have the skin coded to show CDart on my OSD with the following code:-

<texture background="true" fallback="osd/cd.png">$INFO[Player.Art(cdart)]</texture>

The code itself looks good compared to other skins I've looked at, but all I ever get is the fallback image for some reason. Even when I manually select this art, it's still not showing when playing a song, despite the skin being coded to show it. So I guess that's what led me to wonder if art type had changed name. I could try using the SHS to fetch this art and see if that works, but my own preference is to always use local art where possible. So a bit of mystery I must admit.

As for 'reloading my exported library' what I tend to do after I have fixed the tags for a few artists/albums in Mp3tag is to add these into Kodi on their own, make sure everything is showing correctly, then export the library so that a NFO file is created and remove this path from Kodi. Once that's done, I copy these items into my master folder of music items that have previously been fixed, then re-add everything into Kodi. Maybe a bit convoluted, but I find it much easier to manage the fixes I'm making by just handling a few artists at a time. Somewhere along the line, I must have enabled artwork in the Universal Artist Scraper and not noticed some of the artist thumbs had changed before exporting the library. Anyway, glad that you were able to replicate....

[scott967]

7.  Note that for skins property infolabels don't work within containers. 

That sounds like something more my side, can you give me an example Scott. Be gentle, a mode to Confluence that shows the issue would be ideal.    

It is a general GUI issue in Kodi that references to window properties and skin strings don't work inside of containers. There are some clever work-arounds but nothing trivial to implement. So eg in a container in the <itemlayout> or <focusedlayout> if you try to show an SHS image via

Code:

<texture>$INFO[Window(home).Property(SkinHelper.ListItem.Art.DiscArt)]</texture>

it's a no-go, whereas

Code:

<texture>$INFO[ListItem.Art(album.discart)]</texture>

is good.  Or another example is trying this

Code:

<visible>!String.IsEmpty(Window(Home).Property(SkinHelper.ListItem.Art.DiscArt))</visible>

scott s.
.

[DaveBlake]

Questions are fine @Dumyat

Yeah, all my artist folders just contain music for that specific artist only. For collaborations, using 'When You're Gone' by Bryan Adams and featuring Mel C as an example, I would normally tag Bryan Adams as the artist and album artist, but show the song title as 'When You're Gone (Ft. Mel C). This is then shown in Kodi as Bryan Adams - When You're Gone (Ft Mel C). I've always found this method to be quite a useful way for displaying titles where there are collaborating artists.

When I talk about collaboration albums, I mean albums with multiple album artists. The example you give is just a song with a guest artist, not two artists with equal billing for every track on the album. Maybe you don't have any collaboration albums that's fine, in non-Cassical music they are less common, but they occur often enough.

Now you have described what you do, and since you are working on re-tagging your music, I have to point out that putting the featured/guest artist in the song title is a poor way to proceed. I have repeated this in posts many times (someone please put it in a guide), tag the example you give in one of the following ways:

1)
ALBUMARTIST = "Bryan Adams"
ARTIST = "Bryan Adams (Ft Mel C)" <- if that is really how you want it displayed
ARTISTS = "Bryan Adams / Mel C"
TITLE = "When You're Gone"

2)
ALBUMARTIST = "Bryan Adams"
ARTIST = "Bryan Adams Ft. Mel C"
TITLE = "When You're Gone"
and add

Code:

<musiclibrary>
    <artistseparators>
    <separator> feat. </separator>
    <separator> Feat. </separator>
    <separator> with </separator>
    <separator>;</separator>
    <separator> ft. </separator>
    <separator> Ft. </separator>
    </artistseparators>
</musiclibrary>

to advancedsettings.xml. This enables Kodi to read the " Ft. " as a separator and identify 2 artist names, however it can't cope with brackets.

3)
Tag using Picard an let it add Musicbrainz ID tags that will make scraping artist and album info and art both faster and more accurate.

Tagged that way Kodi has all the artists, you could look at Mel C as a song artist and find that track. But also the skin has access to artist images for both artists ListItem.Art(artist.thumb) and ListItem.Art(artist1.thumb)

With regard to CDart... I have the skin coded to show CDart on my OSD with the following code:-

<texture background="true" fallback="osd/cd.png">$INFO[Player.Art(cdart)]</texture>

The code itself looks good compared to other skins I've looked at, but all I ever get is the fallback image for some reason. Even when I manually select this art, it's still not showing when playing a song, despite the skin being coded to show it.

I beleve manual selection of this art should work. Click on "choose art" from the Song Info dialog, add art type "cdart", the select the art for this browsing to a suitable image. Did you try that?