Album Art Architecture

[Peke]

Hi,
What is your setting you have for Music in Device profile -> Options -> File Location?

[LittleReg]

Hi:

Sorry I didn't see the reply was on another page. I think what I've copied below is the answer to your question. I've never been able to understand what this string means, so I'll leave that up to you.

\Music\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track#:2> $Left(<Artist>,20) - <Title>

Thanks!

[Peke]

To translate:

Save destination file to /Music/ Subfolder Album Artist / Subfolder Album name / and filename format will be 2 numbers Zero Padded (01,02,03,...) then first 20 charaters of Artist name - finally track Title

[LittleReg]

Further information...

Yesterday, I spent nearly four (more) hours trying to get to the bottom of how MMA screws up all my artwork. Thanks to some help from Lowlander and others, I have been able to get MMW in line. The artwork links - even though they are still disjointed from one another - are now all in sync and I know what the requirements are to ensure that the art displays per album and per song and per artist and per album artist. Although there are nuances for each of these (which is unfortunate), the behavior is at least consistent, therefore, able to be predicted and managed.

Not so with MMA.

This application is a disaster when it comes to artwork. Not only does it not pay attention to the MMW library, it doesn't even pay attention to ITSELF. That's right. I can look at artwork in a Track listing and see one image, then open up the Properties for that same song and see an entirely different image. Is anyone at MM interested in this? Here goes: the artwork shown in the Properties is correct! Yet, what is displayed in the Track listing - and consequently what is displayed on Android Auto - is a different image.

How can the Properties of a track not be directly linked to the track itself in the Tracks listing? Why would someone architect the sync process to examine more than one source for artwork? However, this gets worse...

The incorrect image gets splayed over a ton of other tracks as well, and the following steps for MMA are useless:

1. Delete the artwork from the track on the phone, but leave Genre and Playlist and resync
2. Delete the Playlist and resync
3. Delete the Genre and resync
4. Delete the Playlist AND the Genre and resync
5. Relink all of the artwork in MMW to itself and resync
6. Making sure that artwork is not only embedded but that a separate file is created and stored in the same folder (this was the magical saving grace from Lowlander that fixed MMA - thanks!) and resync
7. Making sure that the combination of Artist - Album Artist - Album is always unique and resync

As you can expect, performing all these tasks testing for only one variable took a great deal of time - even though the sample set is only 160 songs.

In spite of the above, there wasn't even consistency in terms of how MMA "decided" to fail. For the first few reloads, MMA "chose" the same incorrect image for nearly 90 of the 160 songs. Then, after another experiment reload, MMA chose an entirely different image to load into those 90 songs.

The upshot is that I believe that it is senseless to one-off these problems, talking about nits. Now that we see how to make sure that MMW correctly manages artwork, is it too much to ask to have MMA rearchitected to simply mirror its desktop parent?

Thanks.

[LittleReg]

Pavie:

I sort of understand what the path means, but are you saying that my settings are incorrect for this path and that's why I'm having the problem? If so, why is it that 80% of the library is correct and the other 20% not correct? I have never changed anything about the default settings in MM other than to take Lowlander's advice and create actual files for the artwork instead of relying on only embedding.

Currently, the add artwork process I use creates and stores files in the same folder as the song is in (I assign artwork to *songs*, not only to albums). These songs many times stored in a master folder that is labeled per artist. However, MM creates a separate .THM file that seems to be given the name of the Artist, not the Album, and this is where I suspect that the problem originates. MMW is able to somehow sort this out, but MMA appears to be clueless.

Surely, you can understand that not all people listen to albums only. However, why shouldn't we be able to include a single image for a single song from the album that song came from? And...why does this same process work *most* of the time and not *all* of the time?

Thanks.

[Peke]

Hi,
MMA currently do not work per track album art, but per album and paths can be modified to contain single track per folder and make album art work as per single track.

For my daughter I changed destination path to "\Music\<Title>\<Artist> - <Title>", set to save album art to folder.jpg and to tags

As she uses MMA as primary music app I resynced all tracks that resulted in each track have own album art.

Lastly if you find the way how to replicate those 20% constantly then we have a bug in our hands to fix.

[JXABC]

I have given up on MM artwork standard configuration. For my preferred view in my Collections, which is a listing of albums, with sub-listing of Tracks, my leftmost column is "Artwork" and right sidebar is Selected/Playing Track. This way I can always see the artwork of the album, and artwork of the selected track on the sidebar, which are frequently different as I use the track's Single Release covers (or alternate art) as the track artwork. For the consistent "Album" art per album, I created a pseudo track as an album placeholder for each album to contain the album artwork. 00.0 length MP3. This placeholder is set as Track 0 to be listed first (hence always used by MM as album art; other tracks must be 1 or higher, not blank); TYPE = podcast (which I don't use for anything else), with Title and Artist set to blank (to avoid visual clutter in my listing view).

[LittleReg]

I have basically given up myself. The demand is that unless we can produce "consistent" improper displays of our artwork, then there is no bug, when in fact, it is the inconsistency *itself* that is the bug. In my experience, MM just seems to "tire" of displaying an artwork file. It will display it two or three or six or seven times or so, then it will simply...stop. I have to write down the songs that are affected, then go back into MM, reaffirm the artwork file, then resync to my phone. Most of the time this works, but sometimes it doesn't. This is even more bizarre when it's just one song on an album sharing the artwork file on all songs.

As I stated in my original post, I believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with MM's entire artwork subsystem. I would be willing to bring my files up to standard (if that is indeed part of the problem), but so far, despite many releases of MM since I originally purchased, nothing has changed.

I observe (with envy) how each an every tune on each and every channel of SiriusXM displays nice artwork. I wonder how they do it? Maybe MM's dev team could ask?