art is a disaster (Per-track artwork instead of per album) [#11919]

[pbpb]

I'm sure I'm not the first one to complain about this, but the art feature in mma is a disaster.

It seems that the original design had in mind a very neat situation, where every track was on an album, and every album had a unique art cover. But that is not the real world. In my case, it is a big mess, and I have duplicated tracks, duplicated albums, and duplicated artists, misspelled names, tracks with albums having the "title" as "unknown," and all sorts of other things that are messy.

First of all, art should be by track. To save space, that can include a pointer back to an album if the track is specified to be in an album.

The art search function is insane, or should I say extremely not intelligent. For the exact same track and artist, it can return totally different results.

Some albums have the exact same name as others, like for example "Anthology" or "Greatest Hits." That wreaks havoc.

Next, the entire architecture of how art finding and relating to tracks is completely opaque, leading to much wasted time finding art that never gets remembered anyway.

Also, during casting, if art is found during casting, it does not display on the target device.

Maybe I will leave you guys a bonus in my will, since I have my doubts I will live to see these problems fixed.

I mean, I love mma, but geeze I want to stop gnashing my teeth when I use it -- I can't afford the dentist bills.

[Lowlander]

Some albums have the exact same name as others, like for example "Anthology" or "Greatest Hits." That wreaks havoc.

Album Artist is used in combination with Album to determine what files belong to an Album. Thus these common Album names will still be seen as different Albums (if your files are tagged well).

[pbpb]

I have vast numbers of tracks with no album artist, seeing as they came from a single or wherever. The logic makes no sense and is not documented. In fact, basically nothing is documented. I realize designers had some logic in mind, but I am not a mind reader.

[pbpb]

BTW, as I come across tracks with no album, even though art has been found (that will later be forgotten by the db), I just invent an album name as a workaround. Meanwhile MMA will decide that the art for say a Johnny Cash track should be a picture of Johnny Dep. So, still not the smartest search algorithm. Simon & Garfunkel yields a picture of Simon the Chipmunk.

[Lowlander]

Singles (and EPs) still (can) use Album name as this how they're often identified (coming from disc based singles). Thus this still works. Per track Artwork may happen in the future though.

[pbpb]

Thanks for considering per track artwork.

I don't know about others, but my collection comes from various messy sources, and I might be happier with a portrait of the artist as a young man, than what the album cover might be. In fact, part of the problem is that the same track has appeared in many albums, some of which are like "all the greatest hits of the 20th century" so what do I care what the album art is.

[tygill]

Just to add a +1 to the request for better per-track artwork support.

I have lots of music from sources where different tracks on the same 'album' have different artwork (for example, multi-disc albums where each disc has unique artwork, or albums where bonus tracks have separate artwork, or albums with alternate album artwork, with different tracks being tagged with different variations). This seems particularly common with digital releases. There are also cases where I have tagged music with a common 'album' (e.g., a collection of releases from an artist's Patreon or website), but each track had its own unique artwork because they weren't released at the same time as a single 'album'. In these cases, with MMA's current behavior, it seems to pick the album artwork of the most recently synced track from that album, and uses that artwork for all other tracks that are part of that 'album'.

[gordol]

My problem with the art is that MMA will randomly replace my album art with something else. Usually it's a worse version of the same cover art, sometimes it's something completely different. I know it's MMA because when I notice it if I compare the art shown in MMA vs what's on the desktop, MMW on the desktop shows the correct art until I sync.

And I have MMA set to not search for art.

One time (MMA 1.x I believe) it replaced all the album art on the then-current playlist with the art from one specific album, and it took me months to clean that up as I had to go through my entire library track by track.

[gordol]

Just to add a +1 to the request for better per-track artwork support.

I have lots of music from sources where different tracks on the same 'album' have different artwork (for example, multi-disc albums where each disc has unique artwork, or albums where bonus tracks have separate artwork, or albums with alternate album artwork, with different tracks being tagged with different variations)...

Um, you can do album art per track. Just have to save them to the tag, not to a file.