Artist.nfo scraping and saving to artist folder - can't find app

MusicBrainz Picard
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Hello peeps. I use Kodi on Nvidia Shield (android) and Jellyfin as the server. When I ask Kodi to fetch an individual artist’s info (from the screen while I’m listening to that artist) the scraper it uses generally gets one short sentence of data, way too little… I tried MediaElch but it’s rocket science to me, and also some of my album folders are not in an artist folder, but in a folder called ECM Jazz or 1NEW etc… but even my attempts at MediaElch didn’t come up with any detailed info for the artists it found.

IS there a plugin for Musicbrainz that scrapes and saves artist.nfo files in the album folder (or any folder, for that matter!)

I spent almost the entire weekend trying to make it happen, but failed…

I’d love to know of a way to do this… Thanks, Mark.

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I’m not aware of any Picard plugin that does this. I had a look at https://kodi.wiki/view/NFO_files/Artists , most of the data defined there would be available from MusicBrainz. So yes, a plugin theoretically would be possible.

From your description I understand that you are primarily interested in the biography, right? This would not be available from MB, though, but would need to be taken from somewhere else, maybe last.fm.

1 Like
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I agree with @outsidecontext here - this could be done from a Picard plugin, and you would have to run Picard in advance on your media directories to achieve it.

A few pointers for such a plugin:

  1. If you can code in Python they are not too difficult to write - because you can crib from other plugins.

  2. IMO at this point in the development cycle you should be using the Picard 3 beta and write a Picard 3 plugin.

  3. You will need to write an Album Metadata plugin for this. You will may need to call MB to get the artist data if the full data is probably not included in the Release metadata - and if you do this then you should cache this data (and that means that you will also need to avoid parallel requests for the same artist and only use the first one and to resolve all the calls when this data arrives). Fortunately my Artist Official Website plugin does a lot of this and feel free to use it as a base - but unfortunately it is a Picard 2 plugin so you will have to work out how to convert to Picard3 but that shouldn’t be difficult.

  4. For the biography you should read through the artist metadata and see whether any of the external links can be used for a biography. LastFM biographies seems like a good source when I looked at Rod Stewart (add /+wiki to the LastFM link), but in case there isn’t a LastFM link then you will either have to guess the URL and see if it works OR have a reference list of external link sites that hold biographies. If there is a wikidata link you can often find an Encyclopaedia Britannica biography link.

In totality this is probably going to be quite an advanced plugin. But feel free to give it a go and if you achieve it, then please consider sharing. Good luck!

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Thanks for your replies guys. I’m not a coder, so wouldn’t be able to write a plugin… I’ve opted to do it the hard way, renaming recreating my folder structure to use MediaElch… only to find that the batch processing is completely useless, MediaElch has no way of pausing/timing it’s requests, so it blasts them, and of course MusicBrainz doesn’t deal with that, and the process fails… so it’s one artist by one… at least I have some music to whistle while I work :wink: Tx Mark