by LittleReg » Fri Jan 31, 2020 9:10 am
One of the issues with the album art inconsistency is that the various displays appear to be linked to different elements of Song Properties. "Album Artist" forces the application to choose between different images and group them no matter which image is assigned to which song. This results in the common image being displayed in the Artwork thumb while the "Selected" area displays another. If I remove data from the Album Artist field, this now separates the entries in MMW app, but the MMA app now chooses one and assigns it to all the entries.
As is evident from this thread, what I am doing is trying to reinvent the wheel here. It sure would be helpful if there was documentation to show how the two applications "see" the metadata - the links, the dependencies - so that users can configure their databases accordingly.
I would have hoped that the Song would be the root record ID. This would mean that if there was anything different at all from song to song, then the app would split the entries, including artwork. Next, would come Album Artist, since there can be more than one Artist on an Album Artist, followed by Artist. This would then be the combining sequence that MMW would follow, and MMA would faithfully display.
iTunes was terrible at doing this and blogs were rife with "tips" as to how to get the song combining feature to behave properly, e.g., place a space in the Comments field for one of the songs. This is shameful, since it reveals a complete lack of understanding as to how audiophiles classify music.
For me, yes, I have "albums" in my collection, but I also have a great deal of singles, as well. These singles also many times had closed sleeves for them, and in the cases where they had open sleeves, I've captured images of the 45's themselves to use as artwork.
Apple used to call the slot for images Album Artwork, indicating that if users inserted images in this space, then the images were going to be tied directly to fields related to Albums. Even when we could assign the artwork to individual songs, there was no checkbox like there is in MM that specifically directs the assignment to apply to all the songs on the album. However, this gets down to the definition of "album".
To me, if no Album Artist is assigned to a song, then the application should not group the songs as if they all belonged to the same album. It might sound like a no-brainer, but since there seems to be no way in MM to indicate that a song is a single, an album unto itself, I use the designation "(single)" in the Album field.
With a blank Album Artist field, "(single)" in the Album field, the common artist in the Artist field, and different artwork assigned to each track, MMW seems to split the songs up nicely, displaying each with its own artwork. Why doesn't MMA follow suit? There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how it chooses which artwork image to display.
For example, I have six singles in my collection from The Guess Who. All are displayed separately with their own artwork images in MMW, but on my phone, four are displaying the same image, with the other two properly displaying their individual images.
Any recommendations for solving this would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
One of the issues with the album art inconsistency is that the various displays appear to be linked to different elements of Song Properties. "Album Artist" forces the application to choose between different images and group them no matter which image is assigned to which song. This results in the common image being displayed in the Artwork thumb while the "Selected" area displays another. If I remove data from the Album Artist field, this now separates the entries in MMW app, but the MMA app now chooses one and assigns it to all the entries.
As is evident from this thread, what I am doing is trying to reinvent the wheel here. It sure would be helpful if there was documentation to show how the two applications "see" the metadata - the links, the dependencies - so that users can configure their databases accordingly.
I would have hoped that the Song would be the root record ID. This would mean that if there was anything different at all from song to song, then the app would split the entries, including artwork. Next, would come Album Artist, since there can be more than one Artist on an Album Artist, followed by Artist. This would then be the combining sequence that MMW would follow, and MMA would faithfully display.
iTunes was terrible at doing this and blogs were rife with "tips" as to how to get the song combining feature to behave properly, e.g., place a space in the Comments field for one of the songs. This is shameful, since it reveals a complete lack of understanding as to how audiophiles classify music.
For me, yes, I have "albums" in my collection, but I also have a great deal of [i]singles[/i], as well. These singles also many times had closed sleeves for them, and in the cases where they had open sleeves, I've captured images of the 45's themselves to use as artwork.
Apple used to call the slot for images [i]Album Artwork[/i], indicating that if users inserted images in this space, then the images were going to be tied directly to fields related to Albums. Even when we could assign the artwork to individual songs, there was no checkbox like there is in MM that specifically directs the assignment to apply to all the songs on the album. However, this gets down to the definition of "album".
To me, if no Album Artist is assigned to a song, then the application should not group the songs as if they all belonged to the same album. It might sound like a no-brainer, but since there seems to be no way in MM to indicate that a song is a single, an album unto itself, I use the designation "(single)" in the Album field.
With a blank Album Artist field, "(single)" in the Album field, the common artist in the Artist field, and different artwork assigned to each track, MMW seems to split the songs up nicely, displaying each with its own artwork. Why doesn't MMA follow suit? There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how it chooses which artwork image to display.
For example, I have six singles in my collection from The Guess Who. All are displayed separately with their own artwork images in MMW, but on my phone, four are displaying the same image, with the other two properly displaying their individual images.
Any recommendations for solving this would be greatly appreciated, thanks.