[User 421137]

I saw that Kodi is scrapping the discography for special purpose artists (https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Unknow...ose_artist).
If you have e.g. "Various Artists" or "[dialogue]" in your library, tagged with MBID's, you will get all albums which are assigned to these artists. You will get thousands of records in the table "discography" but they are – more or less – useless.
Whereas it's quite useful to have the all (studio) albums for real artists, it's not really useful for SPA's. Nobody might be interested to have all Compilations from MusicBrainz in a local library. It's just blows up the database (e.g. more than 1500 pages at musicbrainz.org for "Various Artists"). So it costs more space locally, causes more traffic and load to MusicBrainz and potentially slow down your system. Especially on weak devices this might cause a problem.

IMHO it might be good to prevent Kodi from downloading the discography for special purpose artists.
A quick way to keep ones database small and clean might be to delete all discography records for SPA's but not the albums, you have in your library.

[scott967]

Agree with your observation

scott s.
.

[DaveBlake]

IMO discography is a pretty useless thing for many artists not just the "special purpose" ones, for example classical composers.

However the scraping of a discography and the artists that are scraped (and the scraper settings used) are all optional. Hence it is really up to the user to optimse things as best suits them. One step could be to turn off fetching discographies by in the scraper default  settings, but that is up to the addon and not core.

[User 421137]

I agree, that discography might also be useless for other artists but overall, I like it, let's say for many usual performing artists.

I saw, it's optional in the scrapper settings (Universal Artist Scrapper) but it's only a all or nothing decision.
There might be also workarounds, like disabling it before doing "Query info for all artists" (e.g. after initial setup of your music library) and activating it afterwards (for a "Refresh" on a specific artist).

Of course, it's feasible and perhaps better to have a filtering to have a filtering in the add-on (or even the data provider).


I must do a correction: I've checked it in detail and I saw there seems to be a limit of 100 records for each artist. I don't know where this limitation comes from.

However, such big discography lists are not useful for me. I will not scroll horizontally for up to 100 entries in the artist info screen.
I just kicked out big discographies.

sql:
DELETE FROM "discography"

WHERE idArtist IN (

SELECT idArtist

FROM "discography"

GROUP BY idArtist

HAVING COUNT(idArtist) > 75

);

(I will go to a smaller number, 50 or 25, later).

[DaveBlake]

You may not realise @"NeroRome" but scraper settings can be adjusted on a per item basis (See "Set information provider" from context menu), and also "Query Info for All" can be performed on just a filtered list of artists e.g. a list reached via Genre>Artist, or artists smart playlist. It is little used functionality, but you can do things like only scrape your pop album artists, or (if there was a dedicated site for classical musician data) just the classical ones from a specific site. Not the idea tool to control the discography in the ways you would like, but may offer you something.

The 100 item discography limit possibly comes from the Musicbrainz end of things, or otherwise the data request that the scraper addon makes. It is not a limit applied within Kodi itself.

Finally scraping an artist replaces the discography, so you could export to artist.nfo and edit the discography values (perhaps find a way to automate that) and rescrape. To be honest if you are just keeping the first x entires then SQL is an easy way to deal with it.