Album art issues and consequential error messages
Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2011 6:59 pm
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.
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.
But for sure I will let you know if I do find out anything further.