XBMC scraper and artist optimization

[liltee89]

Hi to everyone, I'm new to the forum but not to fanart.tv, I don't know if the section is correct for what I'm going to say

So, in my music library I've some artist that XBMC doesn't scrape because there are some mistakes (IMHO) on fanart.tv, some examples are:
In songs from Bastille, fanart are not scraped. I think that's because on the site the artist is listed as "Bastille (South London based band)". This is correct, of course, but is there a way to make XBMC recognize it? I don't want to write ..(South london etc) in my ID3 tags. Maybe some artist (becaming famous, although) need some cleaning on their listed-names (in this case, only Bastille).
Another example is "OneRepublic", there're two "OneRepublic" entries on fanart.tv. One has a lot of images and one has 0 images. I know that MusicBrainz has create them, but maybe there's a way to discriminate them?

Thanks for the time spent reading

[Paszt]

The content shown in parenthesis after an artist name (in a fanart.tv search) is what musicbrainz refers to as the disambiguation comment. A disambiguation comment is used to help distinguish identically named artists. It's not part of the artist name, just a separate field that lets the user differentiate artists with identical names. You get similar results if you do a search on musicbrainz.org: http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=Bas ... ype=artist

If you go to the fanart page for Bastille (South London based band), you don't see the "(South London based band)", only Bastille.

I'm not exactly sure why, but the search result above lists Bastille (German vocalist for Coppelius) first. When auto scraping, XBMC will use the first result if it has a score of 100 (you can see the score in the musicbrainz search results). The German vocalist for Coppelius currently has no images on fanart.tv so XBMC won't scrape any images. You can refresh the artist information which will bring up a box for you to select the correct Bastille. In my version of XBMC, the search result box doesn't display the disambiguation comment for all the results for some reason, but we know it's not the first.

A way to solve this issue is to use a music tagger that tags the music with the musicbrainz id (MBID). XBMC will then use the MBID instead of doing an artist name search. Musicbrainz Picard is a very good one that I use. And there is a list of more taggers that use the MBID here: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Taggers

The two OneRepublic artists is due to someone creating a duplicate entry on musicbrainz. The two artists have since been merged on musicbrainz but both artist entries were imported in to the fanart.tv database before the merge on musicbrainz. As far as I know we don't currently have a way to delete artists on fanart.tv. We have the same issue with movies that have been deleted from TMDb and TV shows that have been deleted from TVDb. If a user on fanart.tv sees duplicates and isn't sure which one to use, the best bet would be to check the source (musicbrainz, TMDb, or TVDb) and verify the correct Id — fanart.tv uses the same Id as the sources.

[zorensen]

It's correct what Paszt says here.

I'm using the API and the MusicBrainz ID all the time, and you don't need all of that. What's inside the brackets isn't really important, as long as you've spelled the artist name correctly. For example, if you search for Rihanna you get the results from MusicBrainz after points just as Paszr says here. 100 is the best result for your search. When you search for Rihanna, the result says "Rihanna (Barbadian R&B/pop singer)". But still it's enough just to search for "Rihanna"

The "problem" is, as Paszt also says here, is that sometimes if you have the artist with the exactly same it can show the wrong artist first. This can happen every once in a while, but in 95% of the time it will return the correct artist first if you spelled it correctly

This isn't a error on fanart.tv, but just the way artists is stored on MusicBrainz to identify the correct ones

[enzo94]

A way to solve this issue is to use a music tagger that tags the music with the musicbrainz id (MBID). XBMC will then use the MBID instead of doing an artist name search.

Hello,

I am a XBMC's user and I also use Music Brainz Picard as tagger in order to have the MBID. But for the moment, I don't know a scraper in XBMC (I use Universal Music) that use the MBID to search artist. I'm still using the Frodo version maybe it's new with Gotham version.

Paszt which scraper do you use in XBMC in order to scrap with the MBID and not the artist's name or the album's name ?

[Paszt]

I use the Universal Scrapers, just updated to Gotham.

I did a test to see if the MBID was used instead of an artist name search (I sniffed the network traffic to see which type of search was performed) but now that I think about it, the MBID may have been cached by XBMC (I deleted some music, cleaned the library, re-added the music, then ran the test). The test wasn't really thorough and I may have jumped to conclusions. I'm not really sure if the scraper uses the MBID, though it really should.

I still recommend using Picard to tag the music, especially if you scrobble to last.fm.

So the solution for identically named artists is to do a manual search by refreshing the artist information.

[enzo94]

Hello,

I know that an attempt was done to scrap with MBID, 2 years ago. But they gave up because it overloaded Music Brainz servers if I understand : http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=132573

I also use Music Brainz Picard to be sure to correctly name my artists and my albums.

[Paszt]

There doesn't seem to be any resolution in that forum thread.

I just tested the Universal Scrapers with a new artist that I never had in my XBMC library before. The scrapers used the MBID to lookup the information and artwork, so evidently at least the newest version of the Universal Scrapers use the MBID.

[enzo94]

Great, one more reason for me to pass to Gotham

Thanks for your help

[liltee89]

Cool! You guys were really exhaustive, thanks a lot. I'll try this tagger (I now use Tag Scanner, but I dunno if it uses MBID) ..

[zorensen]

I can confirm what Paszt says here
The Universal Scrapers in XBMC use MBID to match your artists... At least the latest version does that and it works like a charm