I’ve a raspberry pi running OSMC (recently updated to Kodi 16.0 21 Feb 2016 compile date). The music source is on an external 1TB usb HD given a fixed mount point via /etc/fstab. I’ve a few years experience using Kodi on other devices but this is a relatively recent (last few weeks) set up.
I’m using library mode for music and everything works fine apart from the fact that no (or at least very little) fanart or cover art appears on the track list when “current playlist” is selected from the left hand pull in menu. I tend to use party mode quite a bit and this is really the default screen I like to leave showing. Fanart and cover art show no problem everywhere else - e.g. fullscreen mode, and album, artist, songs lists - just not in the “current playlist” list.
On custom playlists there is some cover art that shows (but cover art only - no fanart). I thought it may be a caching issue and ran the texture cache maintenance utility (using texturecache.py c) but this made no difference.
I use kore to control kodi from my phone and can see all the expected fanart and cover art for the current playlist on there - but I used kore on this phone to control previous kodi installations on other devices so it may be that the art is already cached in some way on there. Anyway, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to try next so any suggestions much appreciated.
Sorry - I realised not long after posting that I should have said what skin. All of the above applies to Confluence.
Testing with the OSMC skin now I actually get worse results than with Confluence: in general (in all menus except custom playlists) there is cover art/artist thumbnails only - no fanart at all. If I go to edit a custom playlist I see both cover art and fanart - but this is the only place. If I view in fullscreen mode while something is playing there is no art at all - neither cover nor fanart, just the track details. Interestingly, the next track info shows “Unavailable” as well. In the artists list (where I can see artist thumbnails but no background fanart) if I go to Artist Information for any artist and Get fanart the relevant “Current fanart” is shown - and when I exit back to the main artist list the background fanart is still not there, just the thumbnail as before.
Just to reiterate to avoid any doubt - everything in this post applies to the OSMC skin, everything in the previous applies to Confluence.
Having investigated further this seems to be an issue with Kodi 16.0 - or at least a result of the way Kodi 16.0 works on my particular hardware set up. I’ve now installed the second to latest OSMC release (Jan 2016), which comes with Kodi 15.2, and it all works absolutely fine (using Confluence).
Other things I’d tried include a much faster SD card, Kodi 16.0 on Raspbian rather than OSMC, even reformatting the HDD to ext4 (it was originally fat32) and copying all the music back. All these tested configurations had issues with fanart/cover art - not necessarily exactly the same issues, but there was missing or intermittently missing (i.e. it came and went, seemingly arbitrarily) fanart/cover art in all of them. The three common factors across all configurations I tried were Kodi 16.0, Raspberry Pi and a USB HDD - and changing the Kodi version is what fixed it.
I’ll perhaps raise this on the Kodi forum and post back here if there’s any insight into the issue gleaned from there.