Add album art WHEN you rip the disc?

[Media_Allen]

When ripping multiple discs, it seems logical to get the art, size it etc., and drop it into the Properties-Artwork THEN, and have the art added to the tag as the media is ripped and the (flac) files created. But Media Monkey (A) doesn't do this, instead tossing the carefully-tailored artwork into the bit-bucket, and much worse, (B) doesn't bother to warn the user that they are wasting their time doing this, because the art is going NOWHERE.

If this "can't" happen, the the Artwork property should be inaccessible for optical media sources (DVD-R drivespec). I understand the program cannot write to the disc, so the art would have to be stored in memory or in a temporary folder -- I get the complication and why it happens, but it represents an inconsistency to the user experience.

[Peke]

Hi,
If you previously added CD to Library then Artwork should be parsed to Ripped Track along with all other Metadata that was available prior to RIP.

IF Album Art was not transferred with track rip than it is possibly bug.

[Media_Allen]

If I had "previously added CD to library", wouldn't I be doing it twice? I was really trying to do it ONCE. As I noted, the problem is really two problems, first that it doesn't work, and second that the user is allowed to pursue a path that is not going to work.

I changed my process and added Mp3Tag to do all tag management. Now I curate the album art into each album folder as "folder.jpg" and using an "action" in Mp3Tag, it applies all album art in ALL folders in a batch, so I can walk away or do something else. The closest I can get in Media Monkey is to use an add-on that requires I name the jpg file the same as the album name, which means I first need to read the tag data, type it back in or find a way to copy/paste it, and I cannot change (clean up) verbose album name data before applying the art. Actually I'm assuming that add-on works like this because I never got it running before solving the problem another way.

I'm not sure what it says that the more digital music curation I do, the less I find myself using Media Monkey.

[Media_Allen]

I've used Media Monkey for a while now, and found both tag "textual" and album art handling wanting. I still use it for ripping CDs, but for metadata management, I'm using Mp3Tag. It's free / donateware but it's really good. Here's why!
You can drop an entire artist "tree" (with multiple album folders) INTO the program, see all the metadata at once in a spreadsheet-like grid and normalize things like "artist" across all albums.

You can turn on the "cover" column in the view and see which FILES have art imbedded and which don't. If you click on one track/file, you see the art and its dimensions. Often you have one track with album art and you can click on that one and export it, then edit it using some other app, and re-apply it to all tracks. When I curate hundreds of CDs in a session, I "fix" all the album art as "folder.jpg" and Mp3Tag will apply THEM ALL in a batch while I watch and remember what a painful tedious operation this was in Media Monkey! It's also much better for renumbering tracks, especially when consolidating multiple disc albums, and easier for filename creation.

When auditing my collection I literally dropped the ENTIRE THING into Mp3Tag! It's like Excel for sound files. It also links to freedb and Discogs to find missing metadata.

Now Media Monkey has its strengths, but metadata isn't one of them. The constant clicking (or keying) into "properties" is really tedious!