MediaMonkey forum

When I select a collection, I see a number of blocks for "artists" and a number of blocks for "albums".
The albums block show the album front covers which is fine.

The artists blocks show just two letters in a square and the full name of the artist below.
This doesn't make sense to me. Why 2 letters in a block? What is the idea behind this?
Is there a way to use this in a more meaningful way?

what you are seeing are just placeholders. There is, or should be, some background process that populates them, like this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3d6gi7nqcpsx9 ... s.png?dl=0

I don't see any progress. Still only boxes with 2 letters.

Does this require autotagging to be switched on?

willyvds wrote: ↑Sat Jan 26, 2019 11:11 am Does this require autotagging to be switched on?

Not as far as I know. Here are my settings:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/81d4m2xbwsc91 ... s.png?dl=0

The PC that is running has access to the Internet?

If you right click one of the boxes with the two letters, what do you see if you take the "lookup image" menu option? ... You get any error messages?

Here I have rolled down to an artist whose image is not populated yet ... for some reason MM5 doesn't persist the artist images ... it seem to need to download them every time? ... And it takes a while ... Anyway I see this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ofsjjh5dnyol2 ... p.png?dl=0

I don't like MM to meddle with my artwork, so I switched this of.
Now that I have switched it on, MM5 starts filling the artist artwork.

I just hope MM5 doesn't change the album artwork though.

It would be good if I could maken he distinction: update artist artwork only.

Gradually MM5 starts filling the artwork for my ~4000 artists. Very gradually.

There's a lot about it that I do not like
- I've had to switch on "update artwork" and I am not sure that this does not mess with my album art
- progress on finding artist artwork is slow
- it seems only to populate visible artists, so it does not progress in the background; if I scroll down I still see a lot of boxes with 2 letters
- it seems somehow to redo artwork again and again, but I am not sure about this; I see that some images change but I don't know why/which
- all in all I still see mainly blocks with 2 letters
- the artwork has all sort of sizes and shapes

All in all, the feature as it is now is not acceptable for larger collections. It is ugly and wasteful.
The biggest problem I see is that It is not even possible to switch it of.

All in all it is a nice idea, badly executed. For me a real showstopper.

"Look up missing artwork" setting causes automatic searching of artworks for artists and albums, where there is no artwork existing yet.
"Update tags" sub-setting is related only to album artworks now and causes, that such found album artworks are tagged to files. When switched off, found artworks are saved only to cache/temporary folder.

Artist artworks are searched using Discogs service and Google now. They have different sizes and shapes simply because there is no freely available image database of all possible artists with standardized sizes, what is found is used. We were experimenting with searching only square images, but it was not working well, there is much better chance to find correct artist image without this condition. The search is not superfast, because we cannot overload search services, it could lead to ban from these services. And download of original image is sometimes slower, because of slower connectivity to some servers. MediaMonkey does not own or host any of such found images.

You say "where there is no artwork yet". That is not correct, I see that images change. So existing images are also updated.

If there will be no more options to influence this process, it simply requires too much confidence to be usefull.

If it changes existing artwork, then it is bug, it should not. I cannot reproduce such behavior. Any hint when it happens?

I have not seen any of my artwork change here.

I am 100% positive that artist images change sometimes. I just saw several images change.
I don't know if this is for better or for worse because I don't know for all my artists how they look like.

Currently I am still in the process of finding the images. MM5 only looks for images (so it seems) if the tile is visible on screen.
Sometimes it goes smoothly, one by one. Sometimes it skips a few tiles. Sometimes it just stops.
Then I have to click on the tile to make MM5 look again.
And then sometimes a previously lookup up image changes. And by the way: image sometimes disappear.

When finally the whole screen is full with images, I have to scroll down to make MM5 look up the next batch.

All in all, MM5 is now looking up the letter D.
So itt will be sometime before all artists are lookup up.

I agree that it isn't fast .. it is faster to google the images and d&d the one you like

We have ~4000 artists. Not really a usefull suggestion to look up semi-manually.

I have an example now of changing artwork. It seems to happen if MM5 gets a faulty image from Discogs.
Is it usefull if I share the screenshot?

willyvds wrote: ↑Wed Jan 30, 2019 2:36 pm I have an example now of changing artwork. It seems to happen if MM5 gets a faulty image from Discogs.
Is it usefull if I share the screenshot?

You can post screenshot and write affected artist name, I will try to reproduce the problem. Thanks.