2021-01-25, 12:03
EDIT: Apparently this was a bug and it has been fixed.
I have set up the AIF in KODI and populated it with the artist artwork. Each artist has their own folder inside the main AIF. I have set the artwork to Maximum. I scan my music and expect KODI to load all artworks from the AIF, but it picks some art types and ignores some.
Some of the artwork loaded include, thumb, fanart, clearlogo, clearart, banner. Sometimes I have thumb.gif instead of thumb.png and KODI picks it just fine. If KODI finds both thumb.gif and thumb.png in the artist folder, it prefers the .png over .gif. What I don't understand is what could be wrong with my fanartxx, they are not in the extrafanart folder but just located with the rest of the artwork.
To further my dilemma, KODI picks all the artwork in the Album folder regardless of the art type. Including back, spine, discart, cover (which seems to be loaded to the library as thumbnail), 3dflat, back1, back2 (last 3 added for testing purposes only as they serve no use with no skin to display them). But KODI is choosy when it comes to AIF and does not pick everything within the artist folder. Not only does it ignore fanartxx but it also ignores clearlogo1,clealogo2...clearlogoxx (extra logos added for testing).
In summery, picking artwork for Artists and Albums/tracks does not seem to work in the same way. When scanning movie and album, everything works as described in the MAXIMUM artwork settings. I understand this can be by design but it is a bit confusing when one setting works the same for movies, albums and tracks but different for artists. I also understand that artists and albums may be scrapped differently and what works for albums may not work for artists. Still, I expected Maximum means KODI will pick up everything it finds in the AIF, including singing.png if I decide to add an art type in which the artist has his\her mouth open. Then its for me to worry about what skin can even display singing.png but KODI will scan it because it found it in the AIF. If I don't want something in AIF scanned then I either relocate in to some other folder or use the Custom settings and specify what is to be scanned and ignore everything not in the list. Please tell me if am wrong about this.
Funny enough, I just created singing.png (it is an image of the album) and placed it in an album folder and KODI scanned it . Sad this little trick doesn't seem to apply to artists' folder.
What else I have tried: I have set the artwork to Custom and added fanart1,fanart2,...fanart20 as artwork types to the whitelist but KODI still ignores the artwork. I have even gone further and added these artworks to the advancedsettings.xml (which I believe is deprecated in Matrix) but still nothing. Each time I change the settings, I remove the music source, clean the library, restart KODI and add the library again for fresh scanning.
After adding the art type in custom settings something changes. If go to individual artist in the library, choose art KODI lists art types I added but they are empty. KODI clearly matches fanart1 art type to the local fanart1.png. Its seems to know that fanart1.png should fill fanart1 art type but does not fill it automatically. So I have to fill them manually for each artist, starting with fanart1, then fanart2 all the way to fanart20, you can imagine doing that for hundreds of artists. Without adding the art types in the custom settings, fanart1, fanart2,...fanart20 don't even appear in the list of possible art type but in the album section all possible art types appear in the list whether you added them in custom settings or not as long as the type was found once in one of the albums. Although I did not add them to the custom settings, you can see back1,back2 listed in the image below although this particular album don't have them, but another one did and that is how they got added.
I may sound like ungrateful user but I am most grateful to @DaveBlake for all the hard work he has done for the music artwork and to @rmrector for the movie artwork in Matrix. I followed part of the discussion on github concerning implementation of this new artwork scraping and from what I read, this was not easy and it has undergone a lot of changes to get where it is now. So please don't see this as a complaint, I was just wondering if am missing something or if there is a way to make extended artwork scrapping for artist as smooth and effortless as albums and movies.
Finally, to quote the KODI webiste; "Got a smart TV? You ain't seen nothin’ yet! Kodi puts your smart TV to shame." And it does. It surely does. So thumbs up TeamKodi I respect all your hard work.
Am not sure if log is required for this case but I can rescan my music library and provide the log if requested. This is KODI Matrix RC1 on Windows 10 64 bit.
I have set up the AIF in KODI and populated it with the artist artwork. Each artist has their own folder inside the main AIF. I have set the artwork to Maximum. I scan my music and expect KODI to load all artworks from the AIF, but it picks some art types and ignores some.
Some of the artwork loaded include, thumb, fanart, clearlogo, clearart, banner. Sometimes I have thumb.gif instead of thumb.png and KODI picks it just fine. If KODI finds both thumb.gif and thumb.png in the artist folder, it prefers the .png over .gif. What I don't understand is what could be wrong with my fanartxx, they are not in the extrafanart folder but just located with the rest of the artwork.
To further my dilemma, KODI picks all the artwork in the Album folder regardless of the art type. Including back, spine, discart, cover (which seems to be loaded to the library as thumbnail), 3dflat, back1, back2 (last 3 added for testing purposes only as they serve no use with no skin to display them). But KODI is choosy when it comes to AIF and does not pick everything within the artist folder. Not only does it ignore fanartxx but it also ignores clearlogo1,clealogo2...clearlogoxx (extra logos added for testing).
In summery, picking artwork for Artists and Albums/tracks does not seem to work in the same way. When scanning movie and album, everything works as described in the MAXIMUM artwork settings. I understand this can be by design but it is a bit confusing when one setting works the same for movies, albums and tracks but different for artists. I also understand that artists and albums may be scrapped differently and what works for albums may not work for artists. Still, I expected Maximum means KODI will pick up everything it finds in the AIF, including singing.png if I decide to add an art type in which the artist has his\her mouth open. Then its for me to worry about what skin can even display singing.png but KODI will scan it because it found it in the AIF. If I don't want something in AIF scanned then I either relocate in to some other folder or use the Custom settings and specify what is to be scanned and ignore everything not in the list. Please tell me if am wrong about this.
Funny enough, I just created singing.png (it is an image of the album) and placed it in an album folder and KODI scanned it . Sad this little trick doesn't seem to apply to artists' folder.
What else I have tried: I have set the artwork to Custom and added fanart1,fanart2,...fanart20 as artwork types to the whitelist but KODI still ignores the artwork. I have even gone further and added these artworks to the advancedsettings.xml (which I believe is deprecated in Matrix) but still nothing. Each time I change the settings, I remove the music source, clean the library, restart KODI and add the library again for fresh scanning.
After adding the art type in custom settings something changes. If go to individual artist in the library, choose art KODI lists art types I added but they are empty. KODI clearly matches fanart1 art type to the local fanart1.png. Its seems to know that fanart1.png should fill fanart1 art type but does not fill it automatically. So I have to fill them manually for each artist, starting with fanart1, then fanart2 all the way to fanart20, you can imagine doing that for hundreds of artists. Without adding the art types in the custom settings, fanart1, fanart2,...fanart20 don't even appear in the list of possible art type but in the album section all possible art types appear in the list whether you added them in custom settings or not as long as the type was found once in one of the albums. Although I did not add them to the custom settings, you can see back1,back2 listed in the image below although this particular album don't have them, but another one did and that is how they got added.
I may sound like ungrateful user but I am most grateful to @DaveBlake for all the hard work he has done for the music artwork and to @rmrector for the movie artwork in Matrix. I followed part of the discussion on github concerning implementation of this new artwork scraping and from what I read, this was not easy and it has undergone a lot of changes to get where it is now. So please don't see this as a complaint, I was just wondering if am missing something or if there is a way to make extended artwork scrapping for artist as smooth and effortless as albums and movies.
Finally, to quote the KODI webiste; "Got a smart TV? You ain't seen nothin’ yet! Kodi puts your smart TV to shame." And it does. It surely does. So thumbs up TeamKodi I respect all your hard work.
Am not sure if log is required for this case but I can rescan my music library and provide the log if requested. This is KODI Matrix RC1 on Windows 10 64 bit.