Music Info (Bios, fanart, thumbs, cdart ...) (1 Viewer)

[jameson_uk]

Please see MPEI installer for what will end up (at some point) being v3 of MusicInfoHandler).
This now allows you to choose whether to download artist bios / album reviews from allmusic.com or theaudiodb.com

I have very very little time for this so it is provided as is. Please feedback anything that does / doesn't work but it might take me several months to fix things

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I have attached an early prototype of something I have been working on.

This has the possibility to mess up your collection so before you do anything make sure you backup

• Your music database (C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\database\MusicDatabaseV12.db3)
• Your music thumbs (C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Music)
• Your music fanart (C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Skin FanArt\Scraper\music and C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Skin FanArt\UserDef\music)

Also if you have been using MusicInfoHandler then uninstall it (as allmusic.com has changed it won't work now anyway).

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU DO THE ABOVE ELSE YOU MIGHT LOSE STUFF

So extract the three files in the zip and place them in your windows plugin folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\plugins\Windows).

To test how effective this is I would like you to:

• Delete your existing music database (the one you did back up above)
• Do a full rescan of your music database
• Delete all existing artist thumbs (you did back these up right....)
• Delete all album thumbs
• Delete all music fanart

In MP Config you should be able to see the options to choose what data you want to grab / download.

So the options are:

Artists

• Artist Thumbs. This will go through all the artists you have scanned in your music database and attempt to download a thumb. It will use fanart.tv and theaudiodb.com (but will prefer the larger thumbs from fanart.tv)
• Artist fanart. Again based on the artists in your database will attempt to download up to three fanart images from both fanart.tv and theaudiodb.com (it will prefer fanart.tv and will only download fanart from theaudiodb.com if none is found on fanart.tv)
• Artist clearart - you should get the idea by now.... will prefer the thumb on fanart.tv if available
• Artist Bio - Will load artist bio from theaudiodb.com where available

Albums

• Missing coverart - This will attempt to download any missing album covers from fanart.tv / theaudiodb.com (so either not picked up during a database scan or deleted as I asked above)
• CDArt - Self-explanatory. Does not take disc# into account (yet)
• Album Review - This will load the album review from theaudiodb.com where available

Language (in localized version)

• Should be obvious (based on list of languages available from theaudiodb.com

The following locations are used (but these might not agree with other plugins / skins)

• fanart - C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Skin FanArt\UserDef\music
• clearart - C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Music\ClearArt
• cdart - C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Music\cdArt

So at this point I am looking for input on quality / accuracy and % matched for thumbs. Also interested in peoples views of artist bio / album review data.

 

[kiwijunglist]

technically it should be called clearlogo, anduse clearlogo as the directory name as clear art is not available for music and has different dimensions.

alsoshouldn't music fanart be under musicsubdir... i see why you put it there but if we are using existing naming conventions then should use different directories for cdart and clearlogos? anyways just mentioning it as it is better to have these discussions early on rather than when it is to hard to change. nice work

 

[jameson_uk]

technically it should be called clearlogo, anduse clearlogo as the directory name as clear art is not available for music and has different dimensions.

I will update this when I next get a few minutes. I might actually rename it to artist logo as that I guess is what they actually are....

alsoshouldn't music fanart be under musicsubdir... i see why you put it there but if we are using existing naming conventions then should use different directories for cdart and clearlogos?

Music fanart is where it is because otherwise fanarthandler does not recognise it. This is already in place and used by a lot of people where as I don't think the others (cd-art / artist logos) are. Also I have a feeling that some things using cd-art and logos already use different folders (and file naming come to that).

just mentioning it as it is better to have these discussions early on rather than when it is to hard to change. nice work

At the moment it is just a case of changing a string in my code so is easy to change It is also easy to move files at OS level too

but as you say once these start getting used then it becomes more of an issue and everyone needs to use the same thing.

We should really define a cross-MP standard and then everyone can stick to the same one.

 

[HomeY]

Nice work Mike! Although it's looking promising, i've noticed a couple of things after some testing:

Album thumbs (not always) taken from tag and/or front.jpg in album folder?
All my music is properly tagged and has the coverart embedded in the tags, but it seems it doesn't always take the already available art.
For example the front.jpg present for Adele is:
Where the thumb is getting really blurry ->

Another weird thing about Album thumbs is this:
Album list thumb: and when entering the album it gets blurry again (or maybe even uses another file for this since it's darker in color also) ->

Album/Artist Info fails?
When i hit F9 on an album, and select the 'Show album/artist info', it returns 'Not Found'.

but when i play a song, go to NowPlaying, the Artist info shows up (but is missing the Artist thumb)


Now i've got some albums tagged as 'Deluxe Edition' etc, so that might interfere with the lookup. If this is the case, would it be an idea to add an extra for a 'custom search' so you can remove the special edition tags prior to the lookup?

There were NO Artist thumbs scraped, and also NO fanart was downloaded.

** EDIT **
It looks like the album cover for Adele (the blurry 1) comes from theAudioDB.com (since that's the only cover on there). After some quick comparing it seems that AllMusic has better quality thumbs.

What i do like about TheAudioDB is that the Artist Bio is multi-language
Is that gonna be supported?

 

[jameson_uk]

Album thumbs (not always) taken from tag and/or front.jpg in album folder?
All my music is properly tagged and has the coverart embedded in the tags, but it seems it doesn't always take the already available art.
For example the front.jpg present for Adele is:

This is intentional if you have deleted your thumbs The functionality is that this will download thumbs where one was not picked up during a database scan (ie. you don't have embedded artwork). It will not overwrite anything so if you do a scan of the database and don't delete the album thumbs it will only attempt to top up those that are missing. (most are actually pretty good quality though and I am thinking about updating some of the thumbs stored in my tags....)

Another weird thing about Album thumbs is this:
Album list thumb: and when entering the album it gets blurry again (or maybe even uses another file for this since it's darker in color also) ->

That is a skin / skin engine issue. I have not changed anything to do with how thumbs are displayed.

Album/Artist Info fails?
When i hit F9 on an album, and select the 'Show album/artist info', it returns 'Not Found'.
but when i play a song, go to NowPlaying, the Artist info shows up (but is missing the Artist thumb)

Must admit I never actually tested displaying it... only that it got loaded.... will have a look

Now i've got some albums tagged as 'Deluxe Edition' etc, so that might interfere with the lookup. If this is the case, would it be an idea to add an extra for a 'custom search' so you can remove the special edition tags prior to the lookup?

All in good time. I want to get the basics right and then I will start adding things for the remaining stuff.

There were NO Artist thumbs scraped, and also NO fanart was downloaded.

None at all? The logs say otherwise

[2013-07-21 18:01:48,902] [Log	] [MusicInfoHandler Album Details] [DEBUG] - Downloading artist thumb from fanart.tv
[2013-07-21 18:01:48,903] [Log	] [19	   ] [DEBUG] - fileSystemWatcher_Created file d:\mp_shared\thumbs\Skin Fanart\UserDef\music\Ludovico Einaudi_0.jpg
[2013-07-21 18:01:48,956] [Log	] [19	   ] [DEBUG] - fileSystemWatcher_Created file d:\mp_shared\thumbs\Skin Fanart\UserDef\music\Ludovico Einaudi_1.jpg
[2013-07-21 18:01:50,856] [Log	] [19	   ] [DEBUG] - fileSystemWatcher_Created file d:\mp_shared\thumbs\Skin Fanart\UserDef\music\Ludovico Einaudi_2.jpg

What i do like about TheAudioDB is that the Artist Bio is multi-language
Is that gonna be supported?

All in good time but I think you will be disappointed with the level of population and quality of these bios...

 

[HomeY]

None at all? The logs say otherwise

[2013-07-21 18:01:48,902] [Log	] [MusicInfoHandler Album Details] [DEBUG] - Downloading artist thumb from fanart.tv
[2013-07-21 18:01:48,903] [Log	] [19	  ] [DEBUG] - fileSystemWatcher_Created file d:\mp_shared\thumbs\Skin Fanart\UserDef\music\Ludovico Einaudi_0.jpg
[2013-07-21 18:01:48,956] [Log	] [19	  ] [DEBUG] - fileSystemWatcher_Created file d:\mp_shared\thumbs\Skin Fanart\UserDef\music\Ludovico Einaudi_1.jpg
[2013-07-21 18:01:50,856] [Log	] [19	  ] [DEBUG] - fileSystemWatcher_Created file d:\mp_shared\thumbs\Skin Fanart\UserDef\music\Ludovico Einaudi_2.jpg

My bad !!! I was looking in the Scraper folder instead of the UserDef folder
It downloaded 147 farts
And after checking my thumbs\Music\Artists folder, that also has 105 images, so that seems to work also (only they don't show up in MP)

Album thumbs (not always) taken from tag and/or front.jpg in album folder?
All my music is properly tagged and has the coverart embedded in the tags, but it seems it doesn't always take the already available art.
For example the front.jpg present for Adele is:

This is intentional if you have deleted your thumbs

Right, and that's what i did according to your steps so that explains.

 

[catavolt]

Tested this one and it works so far. I do see the album info and artist bio in NowPlaying, but not when calling these with F9 (dialogArtistInfo and dialogAlbumInfo).
The fanart is scraped into
C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Skin FanArt\UserDef\music,
which I find a bit odd, because FH looks up the music fanart in
C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Skin FanArt\Scraper\music,
so at the moment I get double fanart in this two folders occupying double HDD space - doesn´t matter here with 1TB, but would be better to use the standard FH folder and not the UserDef\music for storing the fanart.
Album and artist thumbs are generated correct and in good quality.
So THX Mike for your new approach to get us the music info back

****EDIT***: Artist thumbs are NOT scraped correct, they just show the album cover or a genre cover, but no artist thumbs at all

Example: This is the old artist thumb of Shakira:

... and this the new one: which is a typical genre image.

So some more things to do

 

[jameson_uk]

Tested this one and it works so far. I do see the album info and artist bio in NowPlaying, but not when calling these with F9 (dialogArtistInfo and dialogAlbumInfo).

Noted and I will have a look

The fanart is scraped into
C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Skin FanArt\UserDef\music,
which I find a bit odd, because FH looks up the music fanart in
C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Skin FanArt\Scraper\music,
so at the moment I get double fanart in this two folders occupying double HDD space - doesn´t matter here with 1TB, but would be better to use the standard FH folder and not the UserDef\music for storing the fanart.

This was on purpose so that I could see both existing fanart and the downloads and I could compare. I will change the folder at some point. What I can't do is really combine the fanart as I have no way of telling whether the single image downloaded from htbackdrops is the same as the one from fanart.tv so you could end up with two copies of the same image.

Artist thumbs are NOT scraped correct, they just show the album cover or a genre cover, but no artist thumbs at all

Example: This is the old artist thumb of Shakira: View attachment 133413

... and this the new one: View attachment 133414 which is a typical genre image.

Ahhh do you have the generate artist thumb option checked?



I think that if you scanned the database after deleting your artist thumbs then this will have generated those thumbs. This piece of work will then have seen that an artist thumb already exists and would not try to download it. AFAIK this is the only place where those type of thumbs get created

 

[jameson_uk]

Those who have tried can they let me know

• Rough % of artist thumbs matched
• Whether you have any wrong thumbs (I had one bad match from theaudio.db and one thumb that was just of the wrong artist on fanart.tv)
• Rough % of fanart downloaded
• Whether artist thumbs are better than previous versions
• Whether fanart is any better than before

Next up I will attempt to fix the artist / album info not showing and then I will look at allowing you to change the language

 

[HomeY]

Collection: 52 Album Artists

• Missing Artist thumbs: 7 (+ Various Artists), which is about 85%
• All thumbs are correct and i'm lovin' the quality of them! Better than before
• for 36 Artist fanart is downloaded, so that's about 70%
• As far as the quality for the fanart, it's hard to compare. I see a lot of the same pictures, some new once look really awesome. But i've been using your Last.FM rework for months now, and FH doesn't work on that so i'm really happy with this solution! Btw: IS it compatible with the Last.FM rework??