puzzled by album art

[cakes]

Hi,

For a number of tracks, I've downloaded album art, and this displays neatly in ML2. For tracks where I do not have album art available however, it most of the time displays album art from another track. The strange thing is that I cannot seem to find where it get's this album art from?

what i would like that it just displays an default 'music' icon for those tracks without album art

any clue where i can look?

[psycik]

There is a default icon (a cd type picture?) that is set up in the skin file - this may be what you're talking about?

Failing that if there is a default.jpg in the directory it will pick that up.

[cakes]

I really don't understand where you get the album art you display. For some that I downloaded via the record/ctrl-K button in ML2, it displays fine. And I can find the jpg files back in the directories where I store my mp3's. But then I see also some albumart displayed that I cannot find back at all as a jpg anywhere on my PC. And these misterious pieces of albumarts show up for tracks where i don't have any albumart jpg's at all. But not always, only sometimes it shows the default icon that is in the skin directory (as I would like).... I just can't find any reasoning here.

Windows media player may have something to do with it. When I updated some album art via WMP, then I noticed this album art suddenly showing up at unwanted places in ML2. So I decided to delete all WMP databases, nuke the ML2 database and rebuild it, but no success. Still that same strange behaviour.

That album art must be hiding somewhere, but where?

[cakes]

ok, I found out. Apparantly the album art is stored is stored as hidden system files in a format like this:
AlbumArt_{0F5F481C-0FC7-45F7-81A3-AC84932761E4}_Large.jpg
but this still does not explain why ML2 gets confused by these.

are there any workarounds available?

[psycik]

the only ways you should be getting album art are:
default.jpg - will apply to all tracks in the directory
folder.jpg - will apply to all tracks inthe directory
albumname.jpg - will display for tracks in a directory where the album name is the same

I may have, but couldn't find evidence on my system, also accept songname.jpg for one song in a mixed directory.

The wmp album art - AlbumArt_{0F5F481C-0FC7-45F7-81A3-AC84932761E4}_Large.jpg is not something that I accept and more often then not doesn't "live" with the track.

I don't think I have any code for taking album art out of wmp - I never got that to work.

If you want a better test, send me one of your tracks with funny art (and a screen shot) and I'll shove it into my system and see what art shows up. Maybe give me all the .jpg files in the directory as well.

[cakes]

Hi Psycik,

Before dumping all my jpg's to your mailbox, I looked a bit deeper into it and found out how things get messed up. Everytime WMP does a download for albumart, it first saves them as Folder.jpg & AlbumArtSmall.jpg, and only then it saves them as something like AlbumArt_{0D0B4FFD-DA09-4093-8184-7CDF3F966FFC}_Large.jpg. Fine if you have one directory per album, but I also have a directory with a large number of unrelated tracks. And then ML2 shows the folder.jpg.....

I'm glad that I found myself, so you can spend some more time at improving this great plugin

[nbarsley]

I dont really think that what you found solves anything. I have my music set up so that each folder is named "Artist - Album" and every mp3 is titled "Track - Album - Artist." I've gone through and cleaned up every ide tag with mediamonkey and added album art to the ide tag as well as the folder (named Folder.jpg). It works fine with the default music library plugin. All album art is displayed perfectly. It works fine with wmp. But with this plugin like 25% of the album art is displayed... I really don't get it. I really would like to use musiclibrary2 because of the playlist option but I really want my album art to show up (since I spent so much time on it).

[psycik]

Could you turn on some of the insane logging (in the ML2 config). Start gbpvr then go into ML2.

Navigate to a few tracks with working album art and non working album art then in the title box (from the main screen - where all the actual track names show up) hit the OK button on a track this will bring up a dialog box with the track details and album art if found - hit ok again to close it.

Can you do that for a few tracks and post the logs.

[nbarsley]

Ok i'll see what I can find.