[quebert]

Music artwork question. I'm running 17.6 on Windows 10. I had spent a good amount of time, like an hour a day for a few months work manually adding artist bio pics and album artwork. Things were about as good as I could get them. Recently I noticed a lot of my artist bio pics were defaulting to a seemingly randomly one from my collection (same for all) and some of my album art had switched to lower quality download stuff.  Stupid me, I hadn't backed up my database forever so I don't have a good one to import.  I read up on music scraping but have a few questions.  One,  I edited all my mp3 ID3's and they all have the album art I want to use. I read the scraper defaults to folder.jpg in the album directory first. Is there any way to make it default to use the embedded ID3 image? 2nd, is there any way to have it scrape only the NFO from online? I'd still like bio's and such but I'm not seeing an option to tell it what to scrape. I see an online/local option but it says NFO so I'm guessing that's for the text only but I don't want to have the low quality image problem again so I'm making sure. Here's my plan, if anyone has suggestions to improve it, or if there's an add-on or something that will clean up my library I'm all ears.

Remove my music library from KODI
in explorer search my music folders for JPG/PNG's and delete them all so I know everything is clean.
re-add music library and let KODI scan everything.

And while not a KODI question, could someone suggest a program that can scan my music directories and extract the embedded image to folder.jpg?  I have my music organized in directories /genre/artist/album.  Looking thru my directories I'm seeing some thubnail and lower quality pics. Not sure where they came from, I want to delete them and I'd like to have a folder.jpg so it's clean. And incase there's no way to get KODI to default to the ID3 one. I downloaded ID3 album art extract which is straight forward, but it's not extracting the artwork for most of my music. And I know my tags are done right, I edited everything with Tagscanner and embedded the artwork in each file.

[Karellen]

@quebert

First thing you need to do is update to v18 for the sole reason of the massive improvements to Artwork handling in the music library.

Read this... Artist information folder (wiki)

Then follow this guide... https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=341179

One,  I edited all my mp3 ID3's and they all have the album art I want to use. I read the scraper defaults to folder.jpg in the album directory first. Is there any way to make it default to use the embedded ID3 image?

Ensure you do not have a folder.jpg file in the folder, or extract a copy of the embedded artwork and save it as folder.jpg.

It is common for local artwork to be of a higher quality than embedded artwork, but you seem to have done the opposite.

2nd, is there any way to have it scrape only the NFO from online? I'd still like bio's and such but I'm not seeing an option to tell it what to scrape.

There is no option. If you want to be selective about what you place into your library, then use NFO files (wiki)

You might want to also consider tagging your music files with MusicBrainz Picard. Just remember to disable the option to embed new artwork.. https://kodi.wiki/view/Music_tagging#MusicBrainz

[quebert]

@quebert

First thing you need to do is update to v18 for the sole reason of the massive improvements to Artwork handling in the music library.

Read this... Artist information folder (wiki)

Then follow this guide... https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=341179

One,  I edited all my mp3 ID3's and they all have the album art I want to use. I read the scraper defaults to folder.jpg in the album directory first. Is there any way to make it default to use the embedded ID3 image?

Ensure you do not have a folder.jpg file in the folder, or extract a copy of the embedded artwork and save it as folder.jpg.

It is common for local artwork to be of a higher quality than embedded artwork, but you seem to have done the opposite.

2nd, is there any way to have it scrape only the NFO from online? I'd still like bio's and such but I'm not seeing an option to tell it what to scrape.

There is no option. If you want to be selective about what you place into your library, then use NFO files (wiki)

You might want to also consider tagging your music files with MusicBrainz Picard. Just remember to disable the option to embed new artwork.. https://kodi.wiki/view/Music_tagging#MusicBrainz

thanks for the reply, I'm reluctant to switch to 18 because my favorite skin isn't compatible and probably won't be. I guess I need to get with the times and find a new skin to love. As for the local/embedded thing, yeah I did it backwards. My methods are pretty exact. But I often do things a bit off how most would lol. After I get my folder.jpg thing situated I'll probably find a batch software to remove the embedded images. I just looked at 2 albums and am seeing 500k files for each song. Would free up a decent amount of space and maybe even make KODI a little quicker.  I am running portable mode so maybe I'll make a 2nd copy of KODI and install 18 and play with it.

[quebert]

Well I figured part of my issue, for whatever reason Windows 10 was seeing the folder.jpg as an important system file (apparently) I had the option to view hidden files enabled but wasn't finding any folder.jpg files in my music. When I tried to export from a Id3 it said folder.jpg already existed. I went into command prompt and sure enough "attrib -h" showed folder.jpg, desktop.ini or something and a thumbs file.  I couldn't remove the attribute and make the file visible. So I went into the control panel and enabled the "show hidden system files" it asked if I was sure. BOOM they all came up. Not sure how they got flagged as system files, but I think that was my problem while a lot of my album art was low resolution.  I wonder how people who don't know Windows cope with these problems. I know this isn't common but sheese makes no sense.

Thanks again, I downloaded MusicBrainz, I figured out how to batch pull the embedded images out - TagScanner for anyone who might read this and wants to do the same thing. It's also a really really good ID3 editor. Been used it for years just discovered it can bulk extract embedded images. And I installed a 2nd v18 as you suggested so I can play with it and not worry about messing up my music.

[DaveBlake]

Be aware that the Windows Media Player can create low res image files for anything it tries to play. You may be experiencing this too.

Recently I noticed a lot of my artist bio pics were defaulting to a seemingly randomly one from my collection (same for all)

Kodi v17.6 and before needed a very specifc music folder structure for local artwork to work. All music by an artist and only that artist had to be under a common folder. Collabloration albums, that is those by more than one album artist, are impossible to fix in that kind of structure and so would often lead to the experience you have had. There were also situations where Kodi would simply look too far up along the folder structure. Once such an image gets into the cache it can be very difficult to change - I helped users chase these problems a number of times until I fixed it for v18.

So as @Karellen suggested using v18 is recommended, the skins will catch-up eventually.

[quebert]

GOOD CALL on WMP DaveBlake, I sure don't remember using it but I either did and forgot. Or it did some indexing on it's own. I found a ton of hidden ZUNE* files last. Which of course it, or Windows had marked as hidden + important system files.  I installed Leia + Nox Silvo and so far am loving it. Artwork Beef seems very awesome for v18 too. From what I read on here cdART Manager's either broken and/or no longer being updated. So it was time to try something new there.  I think I went thru this refusal to upgrade back to early versions of XBMC because my favorite skin or an add-on I used was borked.  But I always did and always found a new skin and life went on.

THANKS for the replies both of you, not sure if my library's where I want it to be, but I got all the ideas I need if I do have to do any work to get it there.  I appreciate it more than I can say. This is better and faster than support I've gotten from paid programs.  When I get my taxes back I definitely need to become a donating member. Awesome software and support.

[Karellen]

You are welcome.

I'll mark this solved, but feel free to post again if you have more questions.

Thread marked solved