Extraneous, unwanted album art [#15633] [#15658]

[Richard127]

This is a tricky one to explain as it is random but is proving to be a bit of a nightmare. A few days ago, I added a few albums to MM. All looked well until I checked album artwork (I always have just 2 pieces of artwork - one attached to the album tracks and one .jpg in the folder. This shows as 2 pieces of artwork in the properties artwork dialogue) A lot (but not all) albums had extra, blank pieces of artwork. They had file location information but weren't present in the appropriate album folder. Trying to delete these files causes many different problems, including: Even more blank artwork files in the properties dialogue; Files with the appropriate artwork properly showing, but not actually present. MM says they're in a folder that it's in the exact folder structure as the real files, but with dashes instead of slashes (i.e.: E-My Music-Artist xx-Album xx, instead of E/My Music/Artist xx/Album xx. The dashed folder doesn't exist anywhere (that I can tell, anyway); sometimes, when clicking the "Apply to all selected files" box, MM adds a separate new picture file for every track on the album.

There are many other types of similar things that happen when trying to edit album artwork. However, I managed to resolve the issue with most albums by deleting them and re-adding them. There remains two albums (Loggins & Messina... Hmmnnn) that won't fix no matter what I do. I've even recorded the tracks through Audacity and changed all the tags and the artwork and added them from another drive, but MM still shows extra artwork every time, for these 2 albums. You'll see, in the second picture a folder called "/folder.jpg/ that simply doesn't exist (Yes, I have "hidden files" showing in the OS).

Apologies for the long post. I did get multiple error reports, all of which I sent through, but I didn't copy any of the error numbers, sorry.

Lastly, this only happened after update to V.2170, but I don't know if that caused the issue. All new files I add so far seem to be O.K.

I have included 2 pictures: The 1st shows the general problem that occurred.



The 2nd shows one of the final 2 albums that won't fix, no matter what I do.

[Ludek]

Hi, I cannot replicate and wonder what is so special about the albums from "Loggins & Messina" except for the & in the title?
I see that you selected track properties for multiple tracks, does this issue happen also when you select each of the tracks from "Loggins & Messina" individually?

You wrote that deleting and re-adding the album does not fix the issue, could you zip the folder "Loggins & Messina" and share it via DropBox (or any freef ile hosting service) with me to analyze it? Just send me private message with the link to the album(s) folder.

[Richard127]

Hi Ludek
This just gets weirder. I can't send you the files in question as they are now fixed. But it started happening to all added albums. I fixed the L&M files by doing this: Create a folder inside the artist folder in Win Explorer named "temp" (or anything else, really). Move the problem album from the artist folder into the new (Temp) folder. Then, in MM, delete the album. At this stage MM puts an album thumbnail back in the album view with a disk icon, as if asking if you want to save it. Clicking on the thumbnail shows no tracks however. Refreshing the view (with F5) removes this anyway. Now, with watched folder setting set to "Manual" so MM doesn't try to re-import the album, take the problem album from the new "Temp" folder in Explorer and put it back in the artist folder. Manually re-insert the album (Dragging to "Music" in the Tree view). At this stage the albums were fixed. Phew! I have absolutely no idea why this works when everything else failed. The problem continued to happen for a while but has suddenly stopped. Recent additions have been fine. I'm being very careful of what I'm doing so I can get some idea of what caused the problem. One thing I did notice is that, on at least one occasion, I was running Foobar2000 at the same time (It looks at the exact same watched media folder). With new additions I am adding them to Foobar first, quitting Foobar completely, then adding to MM. Again, I'm not certain that Foobar was causing the problem, but I'll try to watch carefully. Sorry about the long post again, but this totally baffled me. One of the things MM was doing was telling me that there was a non-existing folder.jpg file, in a non existing folder. When I deleted the (blank) artwork icon from within MM it actually created the previously non existing file in the artist folder. Deleting that new file just returned the blank file in MM and so on, round and round.

Hopefully this problem has gone now and won't return. Thanks for the great support.

[Peke]

Hi,
I've created https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=15633 for deeper analyze and optimization just in case.

[Richard127]

Still having problems. Took 2 hours to add 2 albums today. This is making MM5 unusable for me. I have no idea what's causing it. I had mixed issues, including: No artwork being recognised in tags or in folder. Albums appearing in the main album view but without any tracks showing. MM ignoring artwork in tags and folder and then adding it's own artwork from the web (even though auto tagging of any sort is turned off). Adding artwork but saying (in the black bar at the bottom of thumbnail in properties view) "Artwork not added in tag"!? After deleting and restarting, albums would not be added at all, dragging folders into "Music" tree view, MM would import only the folder.jpg and nothing else.

I'm thinking this could be due to some conflict somewhere but I had no other apps running during all this, other than processes running in background. It would be good to know if anyone else is getting this? Could it be due to large library (90,000+ tracks), although I know there are many with bigger libraries?

Of interest in all this: When dragging albums from W10 Explorer to "Music" tree view, there often isn't any text dialogue in the bottom left of the player bar that shows tracks being added and tagged. Also, when deleting problem albums, the pop up that asks whether you want to delete all occasions of a piece of art hardly ever appears. I'm sure this is important with regards to how MM is seeing the album art.

[Richard127]

I'm hoping this will be helpful.

Most of the major problems I'm having don't appear if I use the Manual Scan option from File> Database Management. Every so often though, I see two entries in the Artwork section of the Properties dialogue (as I would expect) but with the folder.jpg thumbnail being blank, although there definitely is a picture and it shows in all other apps. No amount of re-importing or changes of any sort will get that blank image to show properly. It does appear OK if I delete everything and re-paste it in place from the artwork properties box, but it always returns to blank after a re-start. I used the Inspect Element option to see if there was a difference between correct artwork and blank artwork and I saw the following...

Correct images (one filled thumbnail for stored in tag and one for stored in folder). I clicked on the stored in folder image and chose Inspect Element:

<img data-id="artwork" data-bind="func: templates.itemImageFunc(div, item, div.itemIndex, {saveImageFunc: templates.artworkListSaveImage, canReturnAlbumArtwork: true});" class="fill autosize allinside" draggable="false" src="C:\Users\Rick\AppData\Local\Temp\Thumbs\69\63J26VX78BDQ8KPY-200px.jpg" style="">

This entry (above) varies for each correct album, having a different file path for each album.

Incorrect (blank) images always have the same entry:

<svg height="100%" width="100%" viewBox="0 0 24 24">
<path d="M12 2C6.48 2 2 6.48 2 12s4.48 10 10 10 10-4.48 10-10S17.52 2 12 2zm0 14.5c-2.49 0-4.5-2.01-4.5-4.5S9.51 7.5 12 7.5s4.5 2.01 4.5 4.5-2.01 4.5-4.5 4.5zm0-5.5c-.55 0-1 .45-1 1s.45 1 1 1 1-.45 1-1-.45-1-1-1z"></path>
</svg>

I'm not a coder and have no idea what this means, but I'm hoping one of you guys can get something from this. Possibly of interest is the fact that if I delete both thumbnails from the Artwork dialogue, it says they are both deleted but folder./jpg remains and has to be deleted manually. All this and the weird path address above leads me to suspect that MM knows where the artwork is but isn't building the correct image/path to its own thumbnail database.

[MiPi]

The blank image (that svg code) is standard placeholder, when artwork is not found or not loaded yet.

I cannot reproduce problems you are describing. Seems to be some hard to catch bug(s), maybe some combination of things. Could you try to find more specific steps and settings, when you reproduce some of this behavior? Is this related only to "Multiple files selected" or could this happen also for one file only? Catching it in debug log could help too.

Thanks.

[Richard127]

It's difficult to document as sometimes you think it's fixed but coming back to the album later will often display the problem again. I have never had an error report, so can't really supply a debug file (unless there's another way - if so, please let me know). All examples are for adding whole albums rather than individual files. I will experiment with editing properties for all individual files within an album to see what happens. I've tried to document, below, a typical evening trying to sort this problem. Please note, the screen grabs show 2 different albums but the problem is consistent within any given album displaying this issue, but it's difficult to keep up with the various problems and the Mushroom album seemed to fix itself (at least, temporarily, so I had to move to a different album for this example.

The following image shows the problem. The blank thumbnail has a path to a correct folder.jpg file and is exactly the same artwork as in the file tag above it.



The following image is how I would expect the panel to look after being fixed, but the folder.jpg image doesn't have a path! This image will disappear and show a blank after a restart.



If I scan the watched folder again, various problems can occur. The most common though is the example below, where an extrta piece of artwork creeps in. There are now 2 thumbnails (1 blank, one filled) with the same file path except the blank one shows no resolution. Looking in the folder will confirm there is only one folder.jpg



Next, if I delete the blank image and refresh the view (F5) a strange thumbnail appears, with filled artwork thumbnail, but with a strange path that doesn't exist and with dashes between the elements instead of slashes. Deleting that thumbnail actually produces an artwork file with a filename the same as the path with dashes (as in image below)



I have wondered if the MM4 database might have been corrupted or incorrectly read when installing MM5. I have considered starting from scratch but, apart from losing all my history of "Added" dates, I am concerned what MM5 might do to my real world files.

Hope all this helps. Please let me know if you need anything else and I will try to document it. Thanks again for all your help.

[Richard127]

OK, I give up. I decided to bite the bullet and I installed a totally new version of MM5, backed-up and deleted my old full database then deleted it. I then built a totally new database from scratch. After waiting for almost 3 hours for it to catalogue over 91,000 files. I went to the three most regular problem albums... ALL of them are still exhibiting the exact same problems.

Only thing I think might be relevant is that on two occasions MM white screened on me at around 60,000 tracks and I had to restart. Could this be a database size problem? I can't believe it's something wrong with the albums/album art themselves. They all look fine in Foobar, MP3 Tag, VLC and AIMP. I did point the Database Watch Folder to a single artist folder with three problem albums in it and it still displayed the problem. So probably not a DB size issue. I'm out of ideas.

Only other thing I can think of is would it be worth sending you a zipped version of one of the albums to see if there's anything inherent in the files that could be causing this?

[MiPi]

Richard127: in case you still see the problem for the same album, yes, it would be great to zip it together with related artworks and share with me using some file sharing service (send me link by PM). Thanks.
And please add also your mm.db file, thanks. DB size should not be problem, we sometimes work with 2x larger too.

[Richard127]

Thanks MiPi. I've PM'd you Dropbox links to a problem album and my MM5 DB. Hope something comes of it.

Thanks

[MiPi]

Thanks. Finally reproduced, it seems to be caused by the apostrophe in the path.
Tracked and fixed as: https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=15658

[Richard127]

Brilliant news - and so quick. Can't believe all those late nights trying to fix this came down to an apostrophe! I can actually see the double apostrophe in my screen grabs now I know they're there. Glad I persevered.

Thanks again.