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[CoogLFish]

This is quite strange. Looking up an album through my webbrowser finds infos and an album-cover. When trying to find the same album through XBMC it only finds very little info and, worst of all, no cover.

First I thought this problem is due to some kind of database-change by allmusic.com, but at least by the urls there seems to be no change.

Some examples:

(Covers)

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/dr...g23635x9hct.jpg (doesn't work)

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/dr...c871948f4rc.jpg (works)

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/dr...f82516da3pb.jpg (works)

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/dr...f78656ua2jd.jpg (doesn't work)


(Info)

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&u...l=Apqq8b594zsqg (doesn't work)

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&u...l=Aapdfyl34xpmb (works)


Anybody the same problems? Is this a bug or a feature? :-)

[Agrajag]

Same issue here and another one I mentioned in another thread. It appears that XBMC passes the album name to allmusic but doesn't tell it that so it defaults to looking up artists with that name.

For example, I have Abba's album "Gold". When I search, it says, "Searching for Gold" which is clearly the album name and then comes back with an artist named Gold and, worse, since it's the only one, it assigns it to the album and now I can't figure out how to get rid of it.

For Electric Light Orchestra's Afterglow, allmusic shows it as the second choice searching for album=afterglow but XBMC finds nothing.

I also don't like that XBMC applies the found cover to ALL the singles in the list that are unfound.



This post has been edited by Agrajag: May 18 2004, 09:43 PM

[CoogLFish]

I did quite some tests with different ID3-Tags and as I understand it XBMC tries to find the album and NOT the artist. Maybe in your case the album/artist tag in your mp3 is switched. Maybe one of the devs can clarify this matter.

Your issue with XBMC applying the cover of one found song to all the ones not found also happens here. Seems to be some kind of bug, not a serious one, though.

[Agrajag]

I suspect that perhaps the WMA format is incorrectly handled.

[CoogLFish]

I don't use WMA so I can't tell if this format creates problems.

I did some more testing, though. It seems that allmusic.com needs a more or less exact match of the album-name. For example, I have this Bruce Springsteen "Greatest Hits"-album on my XBox-HD. The album-ID3-Tag is named "Greatest Hits", so xbmc searches for it and obviously produces like 30 hits, but no Bruce Springsteen. So I looked it up manually and indeed allmusic.com knows this album, named "Greatest Hits [Columbia], though. So I renamed the album-tag to exactly this string et voila, problem solved.

Quite a pain in the ass, though. Again, maybe one of the devs could make clear exactly how and what strings are parsed to allmusic.com. Wouldn't it be possible to parse both album and artist?

[bobbin007]

I fixed the album info for "Wir sind Helden/Die Reklamation", the cover art will be downloaded correctly now.

The album "Grandes Exitos" is not available in the list when you do a search by albums on allmusic.com (using a brower on the PC). There is nothing we can do about it. Seem like the search function in allmusic.com does not search all albums it knowns.

---

Some information how xbmc searches album.

xbmc does the same as if you go to allmusic.com with a browser, enter the album name from your tag into the edit box, select the radio button albums and press "Go". The result could be an album or a list of possible matches to the album title. It realy depends on the "quality" of your tag information, the closer you are to allmusic.com album names, the better your results will be.

Hope the clarifies a little how the search works

Greets

Bobbin007

[Agrajag]

Well it could just be that allmusic.com has issues. Something is wrong. Sometimes it can find Asia's "Alpha" album and sometimes it can't. Then The Beatles have an album commonly called "The Blue Album" but that this site calls "1967-1970" which is fine except that a direct search by that name comes up with nothing even close.

Couple this with the fact that XBMC does two things currently that make this a problem: 1) It often will find a single match and assume it's right which then adheres that incorrect album to record and then XBMC has no easy way to break that link. 2) it applies the last found album thumbnail to all unfound thumbnails.

There is a way, I now see, to break these links but it's over in Setup/Music. Not very convenient.

BTW, this brings up another issue. The search needs to have a way to ignore things like, "Disc 1" or "(Disc 1 of 2)", etc. It'd also be nice to finally get a feature to have XBMC ignore "The" for sorts so that, 'The Beatles' appear under B as they should.

This post has been edited by Agrajag: May 20 2004, 07:56 PM

[Agrajag]

One other problem with allmusic.com. Apparently if there are more hits returned for any given search, they only show you a partial list. For example, the album "Greatest Hits", which of course is extremely common, ends showing matches for bands starting with letter "B"!!!

So there appears to be no way to add album thumbnails and info for say these examples:

The Beatles 1967-1970 (allmusic drops all dates)
Electric Light Orchestra - Definitive Collection (too many named that)
Chicago - Greatest Hits 1982-1989 (dropping the dates, this becomes GH again)
Bonnie Tylery - Super Hits (too many named that too)
Neil Diamond - The Greatest Hits 1966-1992 (drop "The" and the dates...)

VERY frustrating....

Does allmusic support passing Artist AND Album?

Meanwhile I see that Ultimate Band List, now called Artist Direct (www.artistdirect.com) has NO trouble finding ANY of these, provides COMPLETE listings, track listings, song samples in WMA and RM formats and includes album reviews, band reviews, artist thumbnails and album thumbnails. allmusic.com has the thumbnails but if you can't get to them, what good are they?

This post has been edited by Agrajag: May 20 2004, 09:01 PM

[CoogLFish]

As of today's (2004-05-21) build the album-lookup-function seems to have improved a lot, many of my albums are found now by xbmc which weren't found in 2004-05-18-build.

from bugs.txt:
 - 20-05-2004 fixed: album info can now be refreshed when 1. time downloaded
 - 20-05-2004 fixed: album info: album image was not parsed, if no review is available [MAJOR PROBLEM]

 - 18-05-2004 changed: album info: shows albumname too, when inexact matches are found
 - 18-05-2004 added: album info: manual album lookup
 - 18-05-2004 changed: album info: refresh button requeries allmusic.com

So it seems it wasn't only an allmusic.com but also an xbmc-issue.

Still, I can't find the option to manually lookup an album. This would solve a lot of problems, too, as it would be possible to parse the exact string allmusic.com expects.


With this developing-speed I'm quite sure all of our small problems will be solved by the end of next week.  
Now xbmc is really getting wife-compatible.  

[Agrajag]

I hope so but I have some doubts. For example, go onto allmusic.com and try and find The Beatles cd known as 1967-1970. You cannot find it with a search because they drop all years from searches for some reason. The only way to get it is to search by Artist then go through to their discography under compilations and then select it.

Then take Bonnie Tyler's "Super Hits" CD. Can't find that either as searches for Super Hits returns too many hits and allmusic cuts off any finds after a certain point.

I e-mailed allmusic about this and they agreed it was a limitation on their end but then they said to stay tuned as they were in development on changes that would remove all of this. However, they didn't give any indication on when this might all happen and that means it could be a LONG wait.

[CoogLFish]

Actually I still have a lot of albums which can't be found by allmusic.com or are wrongly parsed by xbmc, especially my spanish and german ones. As a workaround I search with my browser for albumart, convert the image to 128x128, rename the pic to folder.jpg and ftp it to the matching folder.
Not the best and most convenient solution, but still better than ugly default-icons.

[Agrajag]

The problem for me is that I don't want to keep all the music in album order. I like each individual song to have its own correct album art which now explains to me why XBMC is applying that graphic to all unfound songs. It things it's just applying it to songs on the album. I have just under 2,000 songs on the XBOX and they're all in one long list in the F:\Music folder. This makes it MUCH easier to shuffle my songs. I can't imagine what others do for playlists as I don't like listening to just one group or album.

However, I'm not sure how this works anyway. Could I just create a folder called "Rock" and put all the groups/albums under that in their heirarchy and then shuffle play on Rock???

That'd be nice though limiting as many songs belong in more than one category.

[evilnick]

Yep, you could make a Rock folder under F, then add that folder to the playlist, view the playlist and shuffle.

You could also make sure the genre tags are correct on yr music (on the PC) then use the Scan function and then add a genre at a time...

XBMC is one of the most flexible solutions to media playing around! Far better than most paid-for products.

Add a crossfade function and an auto-volume limiter/gain control (how's about replaygain support?!) and I'd be the happiest bunny in the world.
[I know that there is a new feature freeze btw - was merely thinking out loud]

[Agrajag]

Well that is good news but I can't get Playlists working in the version I have (5-20) and it hasn't worked for me for the past couple. I hit "Y" on a song and nothing happens. I go to playlists and it's not there.

Also, my main gripe with my multi-CD changer was that while each disc could be part of a group, it couldn't be part of more than one group and using the Genre (which most are correct but I have some clean-up to do there) would only get me back to that level. I would REALLY love to see a Comment field get used where I could say for a song something like this:

"Rock, Easy Listening, Happy, Work, Family Gathering, Rich" (I'm Rich)

Then I could have this single song be possible in any of the above playlist keywords. Talk about powerful and yet easy to support. Genre's, Moods, events, personalized, etc.

Right now to create a complex playlist takes a ton of work for a large collection and it could be made a lot easier. Here's hoping we get to this come post 1.0.

This post has been edited by Agrajag: May 24 2004, 12:35 PM

[evilnick]

It won't show up in the playlists section (from the menu on the right hand side of the screen.

When you click Y on a song/folder it gets added to a sort of temporary playlist which you can then access by pressing (I think) Black, and can save and THEN view under the playlists link.

I seem to recall that this isn't perfect if you are already playing music so try booting up, selecting the first folder/song with Y and it should start playing automatically then you can switch from the standard music view to playlist view with Black - kinda like the way My Files works with the Source and Deestination views.

Hope that made some sort of sense!