Album art issues and consequential error messages

[BJE]

This is probably more due to my ignorance about the way album art works than anything else, but some other users may find the following info helpful.

A while back you appeared to change the way album art was displayed in Art browser and I was dismayed to see the quality of the displayed album art drop significantly, and some was not displayed at all.

Even worse, every time I opened Media Monkey, it popped up multiple error messages about a file being locked (while doing its monitoring for changed files). Often it would ultimately crash or lock up. After a while I realised that the problem file being referenced was always related to the first thumbnail being displayed in the Art browser, but could not establish why. I still don't know why, but have found a way of avoiding it. One option was to make sure a non music folder is selected before closing MM, so that when MM opens it is not displaying any album art while doing its initial file monitoring scan.

The following 'fixes' have resulted in me no longer receiving the error messages, MM seems more stable, and I have nice sharp album art again.

The 1st thing is that I often use Windows Media Player to quickly play some music while working. This creates album art thumbnails in each album directory on my hard disk e.g. folder.jpg. For some reason MM will always use these to display album art in preference to the tagged album art in each file, hence the crap images. Not sure if there is a setting somewhere to prevent this but I resolved it by simply deleting them all. As soon as I did that I got better quality art being displayed, and also the crash issue disappeared too. Jiri might be interested in that point because it resulted in quite a few debug files being sent his way by MM. Still not sure why the locking issue arose in the first place though, and why it only seemed to relate to the first thumbnail being displayed in the coverflow area.

OK that fixed the quality, and prevented the repeated error messages, but now lots of MP3s that I knew had album art were now not displaying it, and am certain these were displaying in older versions of MM4 - see next paragraph.

The 2nd issue appears to arise from the fact that I have used various other apps for ripping and tagging MP3s over the years. I have never used MM for these, mainly because I was doing it long before discovering MM and was already familiar with those utilities. Better the devil you know, or so I thought. What I discovered is that MM only displays the first album art that it finds in each tagged file - but many of my songs had multiple album art (for various reasons, never deliberate !), and worse still the first two images were often 'empty' for some unknown reason. Only MM seemed to have a problem with this and in the utility I use most often the problem is not visible at all. As soon as I removed the empty ones using MM, MM displayed the artwork without any problem.

The 3rd issue was for what I call the coverflow feature of MM - the thumbnails here did not display for some albums. In every case I found that it was due to the Album Artist & Album name detail, or the album art for the Album not being consistent for all tracks. Sometimes they 'looked' consistent, but the following process fixed the issue so can only assume that the differences are not always visible. I found I could fix this by selecting all songs for an Album, right clicking and opening up the properties window, making sure that these fields plus artwork had common values, then ticking the 'update to all files' tickboxes beside these fields, then clicking on OK. The few times it did not work were due to some tracks being missing from my view and hence selection because the Album name for those tracks was completely different.

[nohitter151]

1). Options > Library, uncheck "Scan track directories for album art"
2). Don't understand you at all here
3). Right, this is standard behavior in MM. Tracks of the same album should all have the same album artist and album values.

[rusty]

Hi,

1) Re. the first issue, on investigating the locked files you describe, I was unable to reproduce that, but did find what is likely a related problem:
http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=8398

Re. having MM prefer tagged images to images saved to a directory as the first image, that's the way it's currently supposed to work (I just tested to verify that it's actually working this way).

2) Re. 'blank' images appearing in tags, please PM me with a couple of such files--I've never observed this.

3) Re. the fact that Album Art fails to display when Album Artist is missing, I've added that as an issue at:
http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=8399

-Rusty

[rusty]

Issue 1) Further testing indicates that the related problem that I'd documented in Mantis is a Microsoft issue: if thumbs.db generation is enabled, then thumbs.db is locked whenever Win Explorer's Details view is used and the program associated with the file type initiates the change.

Workarounds suggested at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 05112f1915 include:
- disabling thumbnail generation
- using a view other than the Details view in Win Explorer
- dissassociating a given program (MediaMonkey in this case) from the file types experiencing the problem

Please let me know if this helps solve the problem that you're experiencing (crash/lockup).

Issue 3) Fixed in build 1384.

Thanks.

-Rusty

[kiwichick]

Re. 'blank' images appearing in tags, please PM me with a couple of such files--I've never observed this.

I think I may know what BJE means because I occasionally have the same sort of problem. I often find tracks that contain albumart that is the same (compact disc and double-quaver) as you would see in the albumart panel when viewing a track with no albumart or clicking a node that doesn't display any album art eg: playlists, Files To Edit. Like BJE, some tracks have other albumart as well but, because MM displays the first one, the 'blank' albumart is what is displayed.

It's VERY annoying because these tracks don't show up in the Unknown AlbumArt node because, in theory, they do have albumart - it just happens to be the 'blank' image. So there isn't any way to know which files are affected unless I stumble across one when it plays and I see the 'blank' image.

Hope this helps.

[rusty]

Kiwichick,

I wonder whether the blank images that you describe (which sound as if they're saved to the track tags) were generated in earlier beta build of MM4 (when there was a bug involving addition of a blank image).

Can you confirm that that is the case? Or are you saying that the blank image that is shown as the first track is somehow being dynamically generated in the latest build?

-Rusty

[kiwichick]

Sorry Rusty, I have absolutely no idea but I suppose that could be the case. Unless I actually come across some of the tracks so I can tell when they were added, I have no way of checking. Don't really fancy going through every track I have just to check But for sure I will let you know if I do find out anything further.

[BJE]

Hi Rusty,

Unfortunately I had completed cleaning up all my album art and had just backed it up (over my former backup) when you asked me to PM you a copy.

I did manage to find a much older backup (date unknown), but could not find any examples of blank artwork, so I came to a similar conclusion to you i.e. that it must have been caused by an older version of MM4. So far have been unable to replicate, so even more suggestive that the issue is a historic one. One thing that I did find strange was that MM was the only music app that wanted to display these blank images i.e. most displayed the first image in the MP3 that had content. It is an annoying feature, but at the same time does highlight when problems exist with the tagged art so sort of a catch22 scenario.

What would be REALLY GOOD is a feature that reports album art that has a file size that does not fit within user defined tolerances e.g. less than a certain file size or larger than a certain file size. This would be great for users like myself who like to replace poor quality images and also replace images that have an excessive file size.

Keep up the good job, MM4 is now so far ahead of MM3 (and in my opinion better than any of the competition) that many of us are taking the calculated risk of using development software simply to get the extra features. Just need to get into the habit of not only doing regular backups, but keeping prior copies !

[rusty]

BJE,

fyi, I expect that the reason that the problem only appeared in MM is because it was related to bugs with Album Art caching (i.e. the track artwork tags was unchanged, but a link to an empty image was added).

-Rusty