Starting with 2024.2.0.3184 I am experiencing issues with loading artwork. I store album art in a jpg `cover_front.jpg` file in the respective directory containing all tracks of an album. These files are automatically recognized as front cover, and tracks usually only have this one cover file. File sizes range from 30-400KB, but are generally in the ~100-200KB size.
The art of the currently playing track is displayed in the main UI. Whenever a new track starts playing, either because I double click it or when the previous track in a playlist finished, there is a chance that mediamonkey displays a generic icon indicating that the image could not be loaded instead of the cover art.
My initial gut feeling was that mediamonkey has issues loading images, but I'm not sure what would cause this from an environmental point of view:
- this issue never appeared prior to 3184
- the music tracks, and cover art, are stored on a Samsung 879 EVO sata SSD drive
- the application, as well as user data including its database and thumbnail images are stored on a Samsung 990 PRO nvme drive
While I was testing the behavior I monitored that disk usage for all drives, which was sitting at around 0-1%, sometimes spiking to ~4%. The storage for all files is plenty fast is what I'm trying to say.
And while the issues seems to happen randomly with no notable pattern, some of the behaviors make me think that this is a display issue, rather than a problem with loading files. If I go to the properties of a track that's currently not displaying any art, mediamonkey finds and loads the file just fine:
If I use the streaming feature to play music to a sonos box via dlna instea of the internal player, the remote player can load the artwork while the local instance of mediamonkey doesn't show the same image (but I also don't know how the mechanism for serving album art over dlna works, so that could be completely unrelated)
If I click the album art to display it in its own popup window, image loads just fine, while the main UI still doesn't display it.
If I changed the display mode of the album art in the main window from 'Playing' to 'Selected' and randomly click tracks to view their art I can sometimes see the error icon briefly flash, but right after that the actual art is consistently loaded. I also noticed that in all cases the art is automatically loaded after I change any property of the track, or if the playback progress reaches (what I believe is) the 90% mark. Double clicking a file to restart its playback also seems to fix the issue.
All of this might still indicate that there is some issue loading files, but then there are a couple of weird behaviors that I can't quite explain. I am under the impression that that the issue is, somehow, related to what tracks are displayed in the main track browser. The problem occurs at random so I don't have any reproduction steps to back this up, but I spend this morning loading several hundred tracks by opening various playlists and letting an autoclicker skip to the next track every second. So while I don't have an explanation for these factors, I'm at least relatively confident that the observation is consistent.
The issue seems to happen more often if the displayed tracks are, for a lack of better word, varied. What I mean is that if I go to the 'Entire Library' collection, use the column filter to only display tracks of a single album in the main track list, double click to play the displayed tracks, and then skip through the playlist, the issue seems to go away.
If on the other hand I create a new collection with criteria 'Mood is A', then select about 20 random tracks from all across the library, set their Mood property to 'A', open the collection and skip through these tracks, the issue happens notably more often. If I then go back to only playing tracks of a single album of any of the tracks where the image just failed loading, I fail to reproduce it again.
Also, I can completely stop the behavior by opening the 'Playing' node (the one that's basically just fullscreen album art) while making sure that its view is set to 'Album Art'. Note that I don't actually need to remain in this view or start playback. If I restart mediamonkey, briefly open the playing node, go back to whatever collection I had open prior and start playback, the issue is completely eliminated for the rest of the session.
Starting with 2024.2.0.3184 I am experiencing issues with loading artwork. I store album art in a jpg `cover_front.jpg` file in the respective directory containing all tracks of an album. These files are automatically recognized as front cover, and tracks usually only have this one cover file. File sizes range from 30-400KB, but are generally in the ~100-200KB size.
The art of the currently playing track is displayed in the main UI. Whenever a new track starts playing, either because I double click it or when the previous track in a playlist finished, there is a chance that mediamonkey displays a generic icon indicating that the image could not be loaded instead of the cover art.
[img]https://i.ibb.co/sv76Rvwh/01.png[/img]
My initial gut feeling was that mediamonkey has issues loading images, but I'm not sure what would cause this from an environmental point of view:
- this issue never appeared prior to 3184
- the music tracks, and cover art, are stored on a Samsung 879 EVO sata SSD drive
- the application, as well as user data including its database and thumbnail images are stored on a Samsung 990 PRO nvme drive
While I was testing the behavior I monitored that disk usage for all drives, which was sitting at around 0-1%, sometimes spiking to ~4%. The storage for all files is plenty fast is what I'm trying to say.
And while the issues seems to happen randomly with no notable pattern, some of the behaviors make me think that this is a display issue, rather than a problem with loading files. If I go to the properties of a track that's currently not displaying any art, mediamonkey finds and loads the file just fine:
[img]https://i.ibb.co/Xf9p4PGR/02.png[/img]
If I use the streaming feature to play music to a sonos box via dlna instea of the internal player, the remote player can load the artwork while the local instance of mediamonkey doesn't show the same image (but I also don't know how the mechanism for serving album art over dlna works, so that could be completely unrelated)
[img]https://i.ibb.co/YFRNWPrD/04.png[/img]
If I click the album art to display it in its own popup window, image loads just fine, while the main UI still doesn't display it.
[img]https://i.ibb.co/1kJHh1G/05.png[/img]
If I changed the display mode of the album art in the main window from 'Playing' to 'Selected' and randomly click tracks to view their art I can sometimes see the error icon briefly flash, but right after that the actual art is consistently loaded. I also noticed that in all cases the art is automatically loaded after I change any property of the track, or if the playback progress reaches (what I believe is) the 90% mark. Double clicking a file to restart its playback also seems to fix the issue.
All of this might still indicate that there is some issue loading files, but then there are a couple of weird behaviors that I can't quite explain. I am under the impression that that the issue is, somehow, related to what tracks are displayed in the main track browser. The problem occurs at random so I don't have any reproduction steps to back this up, but I spend this morning loading several hundred tracks by opening various playlists and letting an autoclicker skip to the next track every second. So while I don't have an explanation for these factors, I'm at least relatively confident that the observation is consistent.
The issue seems to happen more often if the displayed tracks are, for a lack of better word, varied. What I mean is that if I go to the 'Entire Library' collection, use the column filter to only display tracks of a single album in the main track list, double click to play the displayed tracks, and then skip through the playlist, the issue seems to go away.
If on the other hand I create a new collection with criteria 'Mood is A', then select about 20 random tracks from all across the library, set their Mood property to 'A', open the collection and skip through these tracks, the issue happens notably more often. If I then go back to only playing tracks of a single album of any of the tracks where the image just failed loading, I fail to reproduce it again.
Also, I can completely stop the behavior by opening the 'Playing' node (the one that's basically just fullscreen album art) while making sure that its view is set to 'Album Art'. Note that I don't actually need to remain in this view or start playback. If I restart mediamonkey, briefly open the playing node, go back to whatever collection I had open prior and start playback, the issue is completely eliminated for the rest of the session.