WebHelp:Album Art/4.0

Album Art can be edited in a few different ways: via the Album Art window, via the Properties Dialog, or via the Auto-Tag from Amazon function. In all 3 cases, it is possible to save Album Art directly to the tag or to save Album Art images to a specified directory (configurable via Tools > Options > Library > Tags & Playlists ).

Most users prefer to have Album Art stored in their Tracks' tags, however, this is not supported by all About Track Properties. An alternative is to store Album Art in the Track's folder, however, this should preferably be done after first organizing Tracks into /Album directories--failure to do so may cause Album Art to be associated to Tracks from other albums on rescans.

Edit Album Art via the Album Art Window

The Album Art window allows you to quickly Add/Remove/Edit Album Art a single image at a time, for the selected Track and optionally all other Tracks on the Album. With it, you can quickly:

• Copy and Paste or drag and drop an image from anywhere on your PC into the Album Art Window.
• Right-click Add Image to add a new image that you've downloaded.
• Right-click Remove Image to remove the image that appears.

For more involved operations such as editing of multiple images, right-click on Edit Album Art Properties. This will bring you to the Properties Dialog (see below).

Edit Album Art via the Properties Dialog

To edit multiple Album Art images, click Edit > Properties, and select the Album Art tab in the Properties Dialog. All images that are common to the track(s) will appear; simply click Add or Remove to change the images associated with the track, and optionally choose whether to apply the displayed Album Art to all other Tracks on the Album, or other selected Tracks.

The changes to the tracks will be made only after clicking 'Ok'.

Looking up Album Art

You can enable Search for missing Artwork automatically under Tools > Options > Metadata Lookup and MediaMonkey will try to automatically lookup Artwork when the file is played. You can also use Addons with Auto-Tag from Web to lookup Artwork manually.

Properly Passing Album Art to Converted-To Files

When converting audio files to a new folder, as opposed to replacing existing tracks, the album art is carried forward in the same format:

1) A song with art stored as per-track metadata gets converted with the original art also embedded in the metadata of the converted-to copy.

2) A song with art stored at the folder level, gets converted with a copy of the folder.jpg art.

This leads to a complication. Media Monkey users with playback hardware that does not support automated synchronization can use the convert format tool as a means of quickly copying playlists of individual tracks from many different albums into a new single folder, which they can then move to their portable playback device. In this case, the set of copied songs each have the correct art work only if each source song had its art stored per track as metadata. Otherwise -- if any copied-from song had its art stored at the folder level -- then the new single folder of song copies will have as many instances of "folder(#).jpg" as there were distinct folders in the copy-from set. (And in this case, there is no link between the new song files that lack metadata art to their original folder art .jpg. Instead, the metadataless songs will display the album art for only the first folder.jpg copied.)

There are two workarounds for this:

A) Do such conversions only at the album level, so that each conversion is to a separate new folder, each containing one copy of the original album art. This only works if you wish your playback device to have whole copies of the albums, as opposed to a select playlist of specific songs. It is also manual labor intensive, especially-so for large libraries.

B) Alternatively, before doing the conversion of the source playlist, copy each track's album art into metadata art (only necessary for each track in the playlist). This is also very manual labor intensive, but at least it allows users to create a song set for their portable device that selects just certain songs.

Users have requested a new option in the conversion tool, that would automatically embed folder-level album art from source files as metadata art in the converted-to files. For users with large playlists, this would ensure correct art in their portable device song sets, with no manual labor by the user.

Strictly, there is a third work-around: C) When initially building your song library, users can store all album art as per-track metadata. This is reasonable for users with no anticipation of future storage space limitations. However, Media Monkey users tend to be serious music collectors. Their libraries grow very large, especially over years of use. Further, some MM users also prefer to store higher quality art as part of their enjoyment of their libraries. In such cases, storing roughly 12 redundant copies of every track's art can consume a lot of memory. For such users, the above-noted requested software enhancement is the best answer. For everyone else, work-around C is probably the best option.

Related Information:

About Track Properties

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