[Karellen]

Table updated

@docwra
Might be worth adding your site... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_on..._databases

[ronie]

Also please don't use strAlbumThumbHQ as that's only for special users at the moment. 4K 2160p covers are nice but not sustainable in terms of bandwidth for everyone. strAlbumThumb is 700x700 which is enough for most users and speeds up scraping a lot compared to fanart.tv

thanx zag! i'll remove strAlbumThumbHQ from the scraper.

p.s. some api docs for theaudiodb would be nice (hint) ;-)

[ronie]

Perhaps @ronie you can check I have that right.

sure, made some corrections.

It shows interesing things like: if only fetching artist art then no need to make a request to allmusic;

we do scrape an artist thumb from allmusic.

But also why not also save record label logo (as aspect=recordlogo) from fanart.tv?

there isn't really a need to scrape them. skins use the recordlabels resource addon to display record label logos.
(same as we don't need to scrape movie studio logos)

[ronie]

Scrapers will need to manage their own cache to avoid repeated requests to the same resource hitting the web service unnecessarily. Searches in particular will be repeated often enough, but we should be nice and cache all requests to web services. 

when you scrape your music collection to the library, the scraper only makes unique requests.
i.e. we only search / request details for each artist and every album only once.

[ronie]

Therefore I would like to suggest a kind of preview feature already available in settings, that could work like this:

a) User submits an album of his choice and would be able to see immediate results - and differences - when cycling through the various service providers
b) Alternatively, the scraper shows the differences in settings for one or more predefined, well-known albums of a certain genre.

Would I would like to see achieved is that end-users immediately see that same service tag e.g. genre as Rock-Pop and other services offer much more fine grained results. The same would be true for other tags, the detail of biography, list of album releases and so on.

An example preview would be the way to go, if at all programatically possible.

 a) well, such a thing is far from possible with our scraper implementation.
b) might be easier to implement, i.e. display some help text for each setting, similar to what we already do for kodi settings.

there at least should be a wiki page for the addon, explaining all individual addon settings.
and ofc users can extend that wiki page with as much details and/or examples of difference between the metadata sites, as they'd like.

[DaveBlake]

Finally had some time to do some more testing and thinking about music scraping. Thanks for your patience @ronie
I'll report any item specific issues or errors on the test thread and/or Git, and save discussion of overall approach for here.

"None" as a prefered source
I completely agree that we don't want to select the preferences for data sources at too granular a level, and that was not what I had in mind when I asked for a way to "avoid certain data and/or from selected sites". But experience confirms that a bit more than what the Integral Album and Artist scrapers currently offer (v.002) would be very useful.
 

if adding a 'None' option would make sense (it doesn't to me) i can add it.

If "none" could be added to the "Prefer XXX from" control lists then that would be great. The user could then select that to avoid retrieving each of artist discography, genres, styles or moods, and album genres, styles, moods, themes or ratings. I particularly want to skip fetching discographies for classical artists, and with albums mostly want just art not the style/mood clutter.

It is the data selection level offered by the XML scrapers and I thnk users would miss it.