Add-on:Generic Album Scraper

Generic Album Scraper

See this add-on on the kodi.tv showcase Author: Team Kodi Type: Album information Repo: Kodi.tv repo v20 Kodi.tv repo v19 License: GPL-2.0-only Source: Source code Summary: Generic music scraper for albums

Add-ons

Generic Album Scraper

Need help with this add-on? See here.

Searches for album information and artwork across multiple websites.

Installing

This add-on is installed from the Add-on browser located in Kodi as follows:

1. Settings
2. Add-ons
3. Install from repository
4. Information providers (v16 and higher)
5. Album information
6. Generic Album Scraper
7. Install

Introduction

Generic Album Scraper is the latest Python music scraper developed by Team Kodi. The scraper is the default Album scraper for v19 Matrix and later.

The Generic Album scraper can access the following sites to scrape artwork and additional information for Albums already in your music library:

• AllMusic - metadata and artwork
• Cover Art Archive - artwork
• Discogs - metadata and artwork
• fanart.tv - artwork
• MusicBrainz - metadata
• TheAudioDB - metadata and artwork
• Wikipedia - metadata

Notes:

• The music library is created from the embedded tags in your music files. These scrapers download artwork and additional data and require your music files to be scanned into the library first. You cannot run these scrapers on an empty library or for missing albums, unlike the video library. With the correct setting enabled, the scraper can be run in parallel with the initial scanning of your music files.
• Ensure your music files contain MusicBrainz ID's. This dramatically reduces incorrect and failed scrapes, speeds up the scraping process and reduces demands on the remote servers. See: MusicBrainz Picard Tagging Software
• For more information on creating your music library, see... HOW-TO:Create Music Library

Artwork

There are no artwork setting in this scraper. Artwork types are set in Settings > Media > Music where you have a choice of setting None, Custom, Basic or Maximum artwork to be scanned from local files or scraped from remote sources using this scraper.

Types of artwork fetched from remote sites by this scraper:

• 3dcase
• 3dface
• 3dflat
• back
• discart (multi-discart)
• spine
• thumbnail

See: Artwork types

Settings

Scraper settings can be adjusted in three locations as follows:

Settings>Add-ons

Scrapers are installed with default settings. Adjusting settings in this location sets the new default settings for your scraper. From this point on any source using this scraper will have the new default settings applied.

Music>Files>Source

Sets the default scraper settings as described in the previous section Settings>Add-ons

Album>Context Menu>Change Information Provider

Allows you to select which album(s) to change the default settings for.

Preferences

Preferred Language for album review

Set which language metadata to scrape. If the selected language is not available for the album review, it will fall back to scraping the review in English.

Prefer review from

Choose which music database the album review will download from.

Prefer genres from

Choose which music database genres will download from.

Prefer styles from

Choose which music database styles will download from.

Prefer moods from

Choose which music database moods will download from.

Prefer themes from

Choose which music database themes will download from.

Prefer rating from

Choose which music database ratings will download from.

Options

Allow less accurate search results

Not all music sites allow searching of their database by MBID's - AllMusic and Discogs are two examples. To scrape data from these sites, the scraper checks the Album page at MusicBrainz.org for their entries in the list of External Links.

If the Album listed at MusicBrainz has External Links to AllMusic and Discogs, then the scraper can follow the links to scrape at those sites and this setting has no effect.

If the Album listed at MusicBrainz has no External Links to AllMusic or Discogs, it then checks the status of this setting and:

If the setting is enabled, the scraper will search for and scrape using the Album Name. In some cases this can result in incorrect metadata being scraped as Album Names are not unique (eg. Greatest Hits)

If the setting is disabled, scraping for that Album will end and move onto the next album.

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