(2022-03-31, 23:37)justin150 Wrote: How the music library works with art has become a real mystery to me as well. I cannot decide if I being stupid in the way I store my music or Kodi has a design "feature".
@
justin150 the way Kodi handles art has changed over time, many bugs and design weaknesses have been solved whilst attempting to keep backwards compatibility as much as possible. It isn't a mystery, I know I have described how it works many times and it is in the wiki too.
(2022-03-31, 23:37)justin150 Wrote: In my case I have a large number of film soundtracks of various musicals (this is big in my family - not just me!). The music is all stored on a separate drive with each album in its own folder. I also have an Artist Info folder for the entire library which has a folder called Film Soundtrack (with does not have its own folder and fanart jpgs) and that folder has a series of sub folders for each album (which do have their own folder and fanart jpgs). What happens is that Kodi ignores the fanart jpg, but not the folder.jpg and picks the fanart found in the first sub-folder in the Film Soundtrack folder in artist info folder.
That sounds to me like you are confusing how the automatic artwork handling works, and that you can of course manually select artwork from anywhere accessible from Kodi, and that skins can do completely their own thing. Also are you talking about file view (as the OP does) or music scanned into the music library?
You say you have folders AIF/Film Soundtrack/Album1, AIF/Film Soundtrack/Album2... are there music files in those album folders or is this just an artwork layout?
Meanwhile here is my attempt demystifying things for you. I'm discussing the automatic but user configureable picking up of local art that happens when music is first scanned into the music library, or an artist is first added.
Kodi looks for artist artwork (thumb and fanart by default) in a suitably named subfolder of the nominated Artist Information Folder. This simple separate folder structure for artist art means that Kodi can support art for artists with same name, song artists, and artists that have albums of their own and collaborate with other album artists (common in classical music). It also allows the user total freedom to physically organise thier music files in any way that is helpful for them, rather than have to have all music by an artist in one folder.
So have an Artist Information Folder and within that a subfolder for every artist in your music collection (named as the artist name exactly unless there are duplicates), and within each of those the folder.jpg and fanart.jpg.
Kodi looks for album artwork alongside the music files themselves, that is providing the music files from an album have been arranged in a unique common folder. To be considered an album folder it must contain only music from that album, although these files can be in disc subfolders, and no files tagged with that album (and Musicbrainz ID) can be anywhere else. Album folders is an obvious way for humans to arrange music, but users could have a totally flat music folder layout and Kodi would still work idetifying separate albums except for picking up art.
Historically many users have a mymusic/artist/album folder structure, so in shifting to AIF approach if mymusic/ is set as the AIF then it will behave much as before in picking up art (except where this structure has flaws). But I would like to encourage users to move away from mixing artist art in with their music files, and towards arranging large music collections in ways that are human friendly such as having separate music sources for family members or kinds of music (like you have with soundtracks) and hence music by an artist may be spread across diverse folders.
If you have put album artwork into the AIF layout, then the automatic art process is going to ignore it but I guess you could manually make use of it. Or maybe what you have is the result of an art addon? Or maybe you are talking about file view without library scanning?
(2022-03-31, 23:37)justin150 Wrote: I think there are similar problems where you have a series of compilation albums with the artist for those albums being something like "Various Artists".
No, the flaws with art for compilation albums were solved for v18
