[deadbeef_user]

Dear Colleagues

I am new in using Kodi, so excuse me for a trivial question.
I am asking about very basic functionality - how to get the album cover from the databases.

My music files are on local drive.
Most of them are organized into separate directories,
each directory contains single *.flac file and single *.cue file.
The files are ripped from my cd using exact audio copy under Windows.

I can see that Kodi supports cue - the album is divided into tracks correctly.
What is missing is the artwork.

Artwork can be shown in another players like foobar2000 (Windows) or beadbeef (Linux)
In both cases the information is fetched from last.fm

In deadbeef I can prove this by removing/adding last.fm from the list of the databases.

Also I am using Kodi in a file browser mode, I had followed all the documentation - 
how to add the music library, enable online databases and configure them...
I can also force Kodi to refresh the library - and it really scans the local directory but does not add the art from the databases.

The only way I found -
use another player to fetch the art from last.fm and copy the art file locally into the same directory under the name
cover.jpg 
I can in principal write a script to fetch album information from last.fm using e.g. deadbeef player and then copy the art into albums directories...

So - something is wrong.
Meanwhile, I cannot find the last.fm in the settings of the Kodi's Universal Album Scraper!
According to settings, the Artwork is taken from fanart.tv not from last.fm

What is working for me - there is another add-on
Artist Slideshow
Somehow this particular add-on can fetch photos of the particular artist during the music playback.
In the description of this particular plugin it is written that it is based on
fanart.tv and theaudiodb.com
From this I can conclude that these databases are alive and correctly requested. 
But are the album covers available at fanart.tv?

I have feeling that, at some point,  the last.fm was excluded from the data base search...

Could someone help/comment please!!!

Best regards, Dmitry

p.s. I had tried:
Kodi 18.9 on Android box,
Kodi 18.9 on Linux PC and
Kodi 18.2 on Raspberry Pi

[TimeZone]

But are the album covers available at fanart.tv?

Hello @deadbeef_user welcome to the KODI family. It may take some time to learn your way around KODI but once you do, you will be WOWED by the sheer power, spendour and grandeur of KODI .

To your question. Fanart.tv has got artworks for just about every popular artist. So if your artists are popular enough, the album covers are available and discart, plus spine and back cover from the theaudiodb.com.

I see you already discovered Artist Slideshow addon, you need to discover just one more addon to make your music experience in KODI a little better. The addon is Artwork Beef. As the name suggests, this addon gets all the artworks for you. It will download all sorts of artwork and save them alongside you music.  Read more about it here.

Just a heads up. While reading through the documentation, did you find something about MusicBrainz? You get to enjoy only the basics with "single *.flac file and single *.cue file." What you need is to split your audio into individual tracks if possible. Then use Musicbrainz to properly tag your music. Some of the very important tags added include the artistID and albumID which will make sure the correct artist and album are identified by KODI to fetch the correct artwork and other information, otherwise KODI could fetch another artist with a similar name. Read more about music tagging here

As side note:
You say,
"I can in principal write a script to fetch album information from last.fm using e.g. deadbeef player and then copy the art into albums directories..."

In the KODI family, we help each other. So if you are good in writing this kind of stuff, may be you check out KODI on github? Those devs are always looking for someone who can write all sorts of scripts and its all voluntary. Sadly, I can not write a script, so I only help where I can, and that is here in the forum, answering questions that I know. But no pressure to you .

[deadbeef_user]

But are the album covers available at fanart.tv?

Hello @deadbeef_user welcome to the KODI family. It may take some time to learn your way around KODI but once you do, you will be WOWED by the sheer power, spendour and grandeur of KODI .

To your question. Fanart.tv has got artworks for just about every popular artist. So if your artists are popular enough, the album covers are available and discart, plus spine and back cover from the theaudiodb.com.

I see you already discovered Artist Slideshow addon, you need to discover just one more addon to make your music experience in KODI a little better. The addon is Artwork Beef. As the name suggests, this addon gets all the artworks for you. It will download all sorts of artwork and save them alongside you music.  Read more about it here.

Just a heads up. While reading through the documentation, did you find something about MusicBrainz? You get to enjoy only the basics with "single *.flac file and single *.cue file." What you need is to split your audio into individual tracks if possible. Then use Musicbrainz to properly tag your music. Some of the very important tags added include the artistID and albumID which will make sure the correct artist and album are identified by KODI to fetch the correct artwork and other information, otherwise KODI could fetch another artist with a similar name. Read more about music tagging here

As side note:
You say,
"I can in principal write a script to fetch album information from last.fm using e.g. deadbeef player and then copy the art into albums directories..."

In the KODI family, we help each other. So if you are good in writing this kind of stuff, may be you check out KODI on github? Those devs are always looking for someone who can write all sorts of scripts and its all voluntary. Sadly, I can not write a script, so I only help where I can, and that is here in the forum, answering questions that I know. But no pressure to you .

Dear TimeZone

Thank a lot for the quick response.
It looks Kodi has a very nice community!

Meanwhile, you did not answer my direct question - if the last.fm is supported.
Unfortunately, the link to the additional artwork you kindly pointed me does not mention last.fm in the databases lists too.
It is more about vdeos or music videos.
It looks that music is not a first priority for Kodi.

I did not expect that my question is such a fundamental one.
OK, deadbeef is state of art music player.
Kodi is more!

Meanwhile there is a competitor with (to my knowledge, please correct me ifI am wrong) "similar" to Kodi functions - Plex player.

Actually, before writing my own question I had found this thread:

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=321660

where similar problem was discussed -
Plex is based on last.fm and the album art is shown, Kodi is based on fanart.tv and the album art is missed.
But this thread is 3 years old, and I did not get - what was the outcome.

I have only one principal complain - why last.fm is mentioned on the official description of the Universal Album Scraper
https://kodi.tv/addon/album-information/...um-scraper:
This scraper collects information from the following supported sites:
MusicBrainz, last.fm, allmusic.com and amazon.de, while grabs artwork from: fanart.tv, last.fm and allmusic.com. It can be set field by field that from which site you want that specific information.

That is why I was expecting to find last.fm in settings.
I do not know, why it is mentioned.
Probably, last.fm was withdrawn at some point.
Mentioning of last.fm twice without supporting it is at least misleading!

In this case I would rather plan to contact with the add-on Universal Album Scraper developers, than writing my own scripts.
I hope this contact is possible.

At least your reply confirmed that there might be a problem.
Hope, the developers will be able to get this nice feature back.
Do you have an experience to contact/work with developers?

Thanks ones more for confirming me that I am not asking stupid question.
That is very essential for the beginning!

Best regards,
Dmitry

p.s.
As you can see, I am rather old fashion and want basic (OK, basic for me..) features first.
I started listen music from reel tapes (LPs were rare and expensive), that is why music for me is set of albums, not track collection... so I do not need to split nothing.
On the other hand, to my knowledge, one flac and one cue per album is enough for Kodi to make track's "library" .
Also, cue file contains all the information like artist, gender, year and even CD database catalog number. So - for the basic use I do not need database.
The only missed information is the album art...
Even here I have small problem - to show the art from the album directory (e.g. after you made the scan from your cd manually), 
the name must be
cover.jpg
Most of the music players understands *front.* and other templates...
But never-mind....

p.p.s
It is interesting to note that there is one add-on to communicate with last.fm, but in different direction -
One can upload album information to last.fm!

[scott967]

Don't know current status, but years ago at least for artist art, the last.fm api stopped providing artist art (bandwidth usage) and the last.fm scraper was removed (also for artist slideshow).  Now only scrobble function remains (I think).  (Artist slideshow does get artist bio and similar artists from last.fm api).

scott s.
.

[TimeZone]

Meanwhile, you did not answer my direct question - if the last.fm is supported.

Direct answer. Yes last.fm is supported, but no its not used to fetch artwork. It is used for scrobbling and for similar artist.

I have only one principal complain - why last.fm is mentioned on the official description of the Universal Album Scraper

At some point it was used for artwork then stopped. As per now am not sure what exactly the Universal Album Scraper fetches from last.fm but definitely not artwork. And scott967 has explained why. There is another thread here about last.fm scraper.

Sorry I misunderstood your question the first time. I thought you wanted album covers but you seem to be more inclined towards last.fm. Artwork Beef can fetch album covers from fanart.tv and theaudiodb.com not from last.fm. If your prefer artwork from last.fm (fanart.tv artwork are high resolution by the way) you could use another app to download them to your album folder, KODI will show artwork it finds in your album folder.

Do you have an experience to contact/work with developers?

The devs are right here in this forum reading your comments. I don't have to link you up. In fact, I live all the way across the world in a small country in Africa and I have never met them personally. I can't even say that I know them beyond their usernames in the forum but I enjoy their work. So, no, I have no experience working with devs.

Use KODI for a while first and understand how it works. You will also discover what is lacking that you can contribute to, or read through the feature requests by users. If you believe you can implement a solution, do a pull request on Github.

Meanwhile there is a competitor with (to my knowledge, please correct me ifI am wrong) "similar" to Kodi functions - Plex player.

Plex is not a competitor to KODI. I would consider it an alternative. KODI is free and open source, Plex is commercial. So they are not competing at all, at least KODI doesn't consider Plex a competitor but an alternative choice. 
Those who prefer a Media Centre that works out of the box without the headache of configuring every little thing can use Plex, while those who love tweaking everything can use KODI. Each app has its own niche of users. In fact, Plex was forked from KODI a long time ago.

This also explains why some features/services may work with Plex and not KODI. If for example, KODI users overloaded last.fm with API requests, last.fm may need more resources to keep up with the demand and therefore ask KODI to pay some fee. But you see KODI is free and may not afford to pay the fee but Plex can. So what KODI can do is slow down on the API requests to last.fm by directing some of its requests somewhere else, mostly to open source databases.

As you can see, I am rather old fashion and want basic (OK, basic for me..) features first.

That is very much OK. With KODI you do what makes you happy. Keep what you like, remove what you dislike and add what you want. 

As long as KODI successfully identifies your artists (and it can even without MusicBrainz ID), you will be fine.

Finally. I am still thinking your problem is cover art for your albums. If it is, please give Artwork Beef a try. There are many ways of adding artwork to your music collection but this is the simplest I know of. It adds artworks for movies yes, but it also does for music. It is being deprecated in the next version of KODI (v19-Matrix) but by the time you upgrade, you will have gotten a grip on how KODI works and the alternatives to get artworks.

[deadbeef_user]

Dear Colleagues

Thanks, now I understand the reason - why last.fm was removed.
Sorry that I did not find the
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=277848
I did not know that the policy of the last.fm is so strict.
With the beadbeef, I think I have a luck -
the audience of this "special" player is nothing in comparison with Kodi.
I just was surprised that freedb.org and other some databases which are used in opensource music players are not present in your list.
You are just moving some parallel way, which is good - music lovers can choose.
Now I understand the problem and will think if I can do something useful for the Kodi community.

I had quick look on github, but I did not find a separate project for the Universal Album Scraper.
It looks like the code is natively implemented into Kodi.
This is different from the ideology I would prefer (like plugin ideology).
   
This is different from the ideology of separate directory for the artist information you are keeping (I forgot how it is called, but  it is well documented somewhere on your wiki).
I am not sure my approach is useful for Kodi...
I like it for the compatibility with other players (as most of them search the art inside the directory).

So, I am afraid that for myself, I will finish with a separate script witch scans the directory with musics and adds cover.jpg from last.fm if this file is absent.

Moreover, in deadbeef, if I open music directory, the player will scan it down to sub directories, connect to last.fm and organize the structure of the covers in a deadbeef specific cache directory according to the two levels artist_name/album_name.png structure.
This is very similar, but not exactly the same as you are using for separate additional information directory.
Then I want to write a bash script which copies this *.png covers to the original music directories with cover.jpg names.
For sure this script will be fragile - but for me it is the compromise between the time and effort.
To conclude -  am not sure that such a primitive approach will be useful for Kodi community.
 I think, most of the users can solve such "problems" by themself.
 
Thanks ones more!
Bet regards, Dmitry

[TimeZone]

I just was surprised that freedb.org and other some databases which are used in opensource music players are not present in your list.

The www.freedb.org was shutdown last year (2020) right now, this address redirects you to https://www.magix.com.

Long before the shutdown, the freedb was deprecated because all its services were offered by the much more organized musibrainz.org which also has extra features. The only large public music databases I know of not directly supported by Kodi are Discogs and Gracenote. Although I doubt Gracenote's API is free. The advantage of using Musicbrainz in my opinion is it integrates with the other sites like Allmusic, Discogs, Amazon, Itunes, Deezer and others by providing direct links to albums and sometimes artists plus some sites also use the Musicbrainz ID so that there is no confusing artists with similar name. Fanart.tv uses the ID and so does Kodi.

[scott967]

I have to add to my answer re Last.fm.  It is correct that you can get album covers from last.fm.  The artistslideshow addon does query the last.fm api for artist discography and returns the album cover images and album titles as window properties (ArtistSlideshow.n.AlbumThumb and ArtistSlideshow.n.AlbumName) that a skin can use to display.  So in principle you could scrape it during a scan or query info.

I don't really use the Kodi music scrapers at all (my music tends to be obscure) so don't know why universal album scraper doesn't use last.fm.  You would have to ask Olympia in the scraper addon support universal album scraper thread or Ronie for the python-ized generic album scraper thread.

scott s.
.

[deadbeef_user]

Dear Colleagues

As I suggested in my original post, I had basic misunderstanding and bad luck.
Last.fm is a side "problem".

The absence of art is related with  the file browser mode I am trying to use.

How to reproduce the problem.
1) Add new music source (e.g. local directory containing one flac and one cue of well known CD)
2) Update the music "library". One can see that the directory with the new  files is scanned by Universal Album Scraper.  
3) Mani menu:  Go to the Music - one can see that Kodi reports new album. the cover is shown in category recently added or whatever.
One can choose "Artist" - and play the album - the screen with the playlist will show album cover as expected.
4) Now the problem: in Music choose "file"
Browse to your real file destination.
Click on the directory.
What is expected: as the album art was ones already fetched and is shown with other filter, one would expect the album cover shown.
What is in reality:
Playlist will start but without the online album art.
If, in this directory, there is a local cover.jpg file - this picture will be shown.
If there is no such a file - the art is empty.

So, my thread should be renamed
Player does not show online album art in file browser mode.

Best regards, Dmitry

[Karellen]

One can see that the directory with the new  files is scanned by Universal Album Scraper.  

Your post prompted the scraper developer to check the scraper. It turns out the scraper was broken.

A fix is on its way.

[olympia]

The fix has already been pushed back in Monday:
https://github.com/xbmc/repo-scrapers/co...c7dde7388a

So the scraper should be OK now.

[deadbeef_user]

Dear Support

Still missing very basic functionality.

Following your advise, I had updated Universal Album/Artist Scraper from inside Kodi (I do not know if it is a correct way to update to a development version, please comment).
After this, even the "update library" does not add covers from the databases. 
Before this update, covers were fetched from the databases and shown for all the Music "categories" (e.g Artist, Album, Gender etc) except the "file" (aka file browsing mode I am mostly interesting).

Platform: Linux x64
Kodi version 18.9
Adds on - updated using standard Kodi's update add-on procedure.   

To reproduce:
In Medea Souses:
Add new music directory with a well known album: flac + cue
Choose "add source to library"
Update music library.

What is expected: Album cover should appear
What is in reality: Album appears in the list of New Albums (or recently added,) but without the albums art.

Best, Dmitry

p.s.
Also, the Artwork Beef does not help. I hope - it is not a surprise, because it is using the same databases and has the same dependencies.
What is interesting - the "standard" library update is very fast (this is not surprised, as it has to scan only one directory), while the update using Artwork Beef takes some time...
During library update, I can see the Artwork Beef status (top of the screen) but the standard update is so fast, that I am not sure if the status was shown.
OK, for the Artwork Beef there is an option like "show update process"  which I activated. Maybe that is why I can see its process.
In Kodi logs I can see the Artwork Beef's activity, but not the Universal Scraper's.

[deadbeef_user]

Dear Colleagues

Thanks for been patient.
I had just repeated the library update manipulation, and I am glad to report that the album art "magically" appeared.
The source is with two sub-directories with two albums.
I was forced to make update twice - the first update brought me one cover, the second brought the rest.
From this I can conclude that the databases are overloaded, and, most probably, the problem I reported message before was related with the database access / overload problem.
It looked like the connection was rejected.
Small comment, from my experience, last.fm never had such problems (OK, never say never...)

OK, now the album art was fetched.
There only one question -
Why the album art been in principal present and downloaded from the databases during the directories scans is not shown in "files" browser mode?
This "category" is present, but somehow unique.

I think, it would be simple to connect the real file location with the already downloaded album art.

Am I the first who expects such a feature?
Or was it removed at some point?
I suspect that this mapping (real file <=> downloaded art) information is already in Kodi, but works only in opposite direction.

Could you please consider my post like a feature request!

What I am expecting:
Go to Misic
"Files"
File browser appears, one can navigate to the real_album_location
Open directory.
At this point Kodi should
1) scan the directory,
2) find cue and corresponding flac (or *.ape, or etc,  according to the list of supported files)
3) open player and show in player the local cover.jpn, if present
All these points 1,2,3 are working perfect
4) if cover.jpg is not present - show the album art which was already fetched from the remote databases during initial "library" update

To my knowledge (I am not developer of the deadbeef), in deadbeef player the step (4) it is done very simple - player searches the art in the cache directory according to the Artist/Album structure.
If the structure is missed, it fetches the art from last.fm using Artist/Album information from cue.
If the art is found, it is copied into the cache structure and this art is used for the future.
This scenario is similar to the Kodi's "scan source files", but is done for one particular cue file. 
I If the request fails (after some timeout it) the default fake art unknown_artist_unknown_album.png is shown (and saved into the cache).

What is good in Kodi - the fetching is already done, this analog of the cache structure is already build,
so in this "files" mode the art can be shown immediately. The only "problem" is to find it in Kod'is library file structure.

If you think that my suggestion in contradiction with the Kodi's ideology -
just forget about my request.
I do understand that my usage of the music is old-fashion.

Best regards, Dmitry

[deadbeef_user]

OK, I had found that the file browser mode was discussed a lot
> Discussions > Feature Requests > How many people only(or mostly) use file mode due to library limitations?
Basically all the arguments are there.
Sorry for raising my questions.
What can I say - now days the file mode is "almost" perfect. That is why I was confused - everything was fine - only the small part - the album art - was not working as "expected".
I will try to solve my particular inconveniences by myself.
I do not think my manual (or semi-automatic) workaround of adding the album art will be useful for the community.
One can say - want all the features - use library mode.
Thanks for the nice player!
Best regards, Dmitry

[DaveBlake]

@deadbeef_user you want to see album art while in file mode either:
a) put each album in it's own folder, have local art in a folder.jpg files curated yourself
or
b) add the music to the music library and scrape remote art using a scraper. File mode will pull in the art from the library entries.

It sounds to me that you want to use remote art but have not scraped any. 
Scraping remote art does not happen automatically, you have to either use "query for all" from the context menu on an albums node, or enable "fetch additional info on library update" setting before scanning music into the library. Simply pointing file mode at a source, and not scanning into the library and scraping it, is not going to magically fetch remote art.

Using single files for whole albums and cue sheets limits the data that can be provided to the music library, it also limits scraping to using album title and artist name (often insufficient to identify uniquely e.g. there are 5 different albums by Peter Gabriel called "Peter Gabriel"). It sounds like there may have been an issue with the Universal Album Scraper while you have been trying t use it, that happens as the remote sites often change the format of XML results.

Also the remote art is fetched and cached in the background, hence images may not appear immediately depending on that process.