2008-12-30, 12:33
AllMusic.com isn't updated on a regular basis and doesn't list many relatively unknown artists. I'd expect a boost in search results from almost any new scraper, if its last.fm or discogs.. These two sites are both as good, provide a decent API etc.. One might be better than the other when it comes to specific musical nices. Most people are better off to use their favorite scraper for regular searches. We might want to make it a bit easier to switch scrapers, from the Album/Movie info screen or the manual search screen maybe ?
Anyway, in meantime I did some testing on a discogs.com scraper. This scraper script is just a few lines, it has CreateAlbumSearchUrl and GetAlbumSearchResults nodes and thats about it. Where I get stuck is testing the thing, XBMC simply crashes if I use it (no messages in xbmc.log).
The 'Scrap' test tool looks promising, however it is built to handle video scrapers, not music. Tried to fix that as well, but got caught up in C++ syntax :S Scraper development would be much easier if anyone could fix that Scrap tool. Doesn't look like an easy job, though ..
Am I missing a development tool here, should I be debugging from Visual C++ etc. ?
Anyway, in meantime I did some testing on a discogs.com scraper. This scraper script is just a few lines, it has CreateAlbumSearchUrl and GetAlbumSearchResults nodes and thats about it. Where I get stuck is testing the thing, XBMC simply crashes if I use it (no messages in xbmc.log).
The 'Scrap' test tool looks promising, however it is built to handle video scrapers, not music. Tried to fix that as well, but got caught up in C++ syntax :S Scraper development would be much easier if anyone could fix that Scrap tool. Doesn't look like an easy job, though ..
Am I missing a development tool here, should I be debugging from Visual C++ etc. ?
