MediaMonkey forum

I keep getting frustrated and utterly disappointed with Media Monkey.

I don't know about the rest of you but tagging/reading Album Art is completely worthless in my opinion. It DOESN'T WORK. When it does, it's only because its proprietary to Media Monkey and it's database. Now I thought that tagging and embedding MP3's was the way to go because of portability and for use across multiple players. Don't tie me down Media Monkey!!!

To me, tagging art is an essential part of a player's functionality and it needs to work right since now we have portable devices and for just all-around visual aesthetics. It's important. I know the developers work extremely hard but why oh why is this happening?!

All of my tracks have their artwork embedded. I know this. All my tracks show the embedded artwork in other programs like MP3Tag and iTunes. And I know iTunes links art but I've run scripts to embed it and cleared all downloaded artwork and my tunes are still perfect within other players except one - MM!

I don't want LINKED ART. THAT'S THE DEVIL. To me it's just a band-aid for a much bigger problem. Embedded art is the way. So here I come to MM RC-1 with my library of perfectly tagged tunes, add it to the library and guess what? Every single album shows a blank image. It's says there is an image but no pretty picture.They're all invalid/blank!!! So what, I have to retag the art in every single album from within MM so it knows it's embedded?!! What's even crazier is what I'm seeing sometimes when copying & pasting art into the file. Say you copy a cover from Google and then paste it into the Artwork section. MM shows it and then once you navigate away and come back, the image is blank again. Vanishes! It's there but it's now INVALID! And the whole "apply to all tracks checkbox" rarely does its intention. Usually it embeds it but GUESS WHAT?! It becomes invalid/blank again within a short amount of time. So more tracks getting invalid artwork embedded into them. Can MM not read "Truly" embedded art or what!?

Anybody have solutions here or just some kind words. This needs to be fixed. I've wrapped my head around it, Cleared the library, uninstalled/reinstalled and I still get no art. I'm not retagging all my art from within MM's own little world even though I love this player so much. That's ridiculous. Could it be the tag version? I'm running all ID3 2.4. That's my only guess right now. . .

This probably isn't what you want to hear but..
I, in all my time using MM2 and MM3, have never had this issue with album artwork.
I do believe that dragging/dropping artwork onto song(s) and having them not show up later was an issue in previous versions of MM3, but I just tried this myself in a clean install of MM3 RC1 (on a clean install of Vista) and it works with no problems, Windows sees the embedded image and changes the icons for the songs accordingly.
That being said, Maybe theres an issue on your end with something installed that is messing with the album artwork. Maybe you could try doing a clean install of MM3 RC1 and that would fix your problem.
I've used MM3 since Alpha3 or 4... and I've had very few issues, I've actually had MORE issues using iTunes than any and all of the MM3 pre-release versions thus far.

Thanks. I do love MediaMonkey. More than likely it'll probably end up being something wrong on my end but I have noticed in the forums some similar issues of vanishing artwork and just general art problems in general keep popping up so I'm not sure if I'm completely alone on this.

Unless someone else posts something here, I'll keep troubleshooting. I do find it odd though that MP3Tag shows everything in working order and I continue to have problems with MM. hmmmnnn. . . .

Wanted to give a quick update on this problem. I just installed Winamp and it's also showing all of my artwork just fine.

The weird part is Trixmoto's Album Art Tagger doesn't say the art is invalid. It show's it's in the tag but there's no picture, just the CD with the music note is all that's there. I'm gonna install an MM 2.55 and see what happens. . .

I really want to get to the bottom of this.

We also, as if we find where the problem is exactly. It should/will be fixed.

Keep us posted, if you in any case you have have any debug log please send us and we will debug it.

Thanks Peke!

I can't for the life of me figure this out though. It continues to seem like any music that is embedded with artwork in say another program (itunes using the Get Info panel, MP3Tag, etc.) MM doesn't like it or something. If it isn't embedded from within MM's album art panel or using Trixmoto's AAT script, the images will just come up as generic artwork. Could I have a corrupted database or some existing MM database/settings file left somewhere that's causing this problem of not reading the art files correctly?

I'm not as familiar with the debug thing but will report this if this goes on too long and I can't get it fixed. The drawing board continues. . .

Success Everybody!! I think I figured out what's going on! Developers please take note unless this has already been figured out.

I guess I'm a bit of a perfectionist or just want things to work the same (as I'm sure most of you do) across whatever my choice of taggers and players are at a given time. I know it's a hurdle but I feel it can be done.

After testing and more testing it appears it all had to do with the ID3 v2.4 tag!

For now I would say that MM is a bit of a culprit here with its handling and rendering of embedded artwork in ID3 v2.4 tags. If you've taken the plunge to update all your tags or if you've got a tagger that's tagging your files with the new 2.4 (my MP3Tag setting was the little guy doing it), MM isn't going to show that artwork. I've done several tests and continue to see the same results. I've switched back down to 2.3 and *poof* the artwork returns. Up to 2.4 - *poof* gone again. Like Clockwork. As I said previously, it does indicate there's cover art but with a generic picture. iTunes and MP3Tag are reading the 2.4's artwork just fine. Mine kept switching on me because it seems MM isn't writing 2.4 tags. The options are only ID3v1 or ID3v2? But WHICH VERSION OF ID2v2? - .3, .4? My guess is it's writing ID3 v2.3 and right not isn't recognizing 2.4 stuff.

So for now use 2.3 everybody! Case closed.

I'm just reading your other posts on the matter and would like to ask you to send us one example with Album art save in ID3v2.4 that MM do not handle correctly so that we can fix that as promised.
Please state all your findings, MM version you tested with, apps that read it correctly along with file example and send it to support [at] mediamonkey [dot] com

Sure, Peke. I'll try to get that to you as soon as possible.

I sure don't want to waste your time if it's only me seeing this strange issue! It appears to a be a bug with MM though.

Cheers.

No matter if it is only you or global problem, we like to check issues and maintain MM quality and stability for all our users.

I have been seeing this as well. I will try to email some samples over the weekend.

I just wanted to chime in with the same (similar?) problem, but my issue is with MM and not with any other media programs or taggers.

I am using MM to find album art from amazon for all of my files, then embedding the art into the file. It will take a few seconds to update the tags, and the picture shows up in the album art window.

However, if I select a different file, then re-select the file I just tagged, the image is now missing. I can right-click on the album art window and it says there's an image attached, but I can't see it. This is immediately after seeing the image a moment ago and tagging. It will happen whether I drag and drop the image, copy and paste it, or use the auto-tagger. If I try to re-tag it, same thing. It will show up in the album art window until I navigate away and back. And if I right-click it will list a second embedded image but still no picture.

This was happening with MM 2.5.5.998 and I tried updating to MM 3.0.0.1105, but have the same issue.

All of my files are mp3 files.

My music files are all stored an an external USB drive, connected to another computer and shared over my network. I have full read-write access to the drive, and MM can see and play everything to/from the drive.

The problem happens on about 50% of the files that I tag. AND, I think it's intermittent -- in other words, if an image won't embed for me one time, but I try again an hour or day later, I think it eventually works. What I do is run through a bunch of files embedding the tags, then later come back and redo the ones that didn't work. And keep repeating over and over until I have them done and the images stick.

This makes me THINK that there's an issue with timing out or something. As in, if MM takes too long to embed the image it gives up and only a blank image gets embedded - but it doesn't give me an error.

I'm still relatively new to MM, so if there is a log file you can point me to, I'd be glad to post it.

Fixed in RC-3

-Rusty