Tied up in knots- Album Art stylee

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colin_e
Posts: 80
Joined: Thu Dec 28, 2006 6:39 pm

Tied up in knots- Album Art stylee

Post by colin_e »

MediaMonkey: 2.5.5.998

New user to MM, and mostly very impressed apart from some (mostly minor) bugs.

However I got myself massively tied in knots with one largish job of editing album art. I'd like to know if this is a "feature", and if there are clever ways to minimise the pain.

Scenario
----------
  • I ripped a large box-set CD collection (HitchHikers Guide, 13 CDs!). Each CD was tagged and stored in an album per CD. I.e. the Album names were "HitchHikers Guide - 01" ... "HitchHikers Guide 13".

    After sorting the text tags I started on the album art. Each "chapter" (series) of the radio programme is on 3CDs, so I applied the same album art image to 3 CDs at a time. So far so good.

    Then I found a better image for one series. So I tried to overwrite the first cover image with another.

    This failed. It took me a while to discover the tags (and MM) support MULTIPLE cover art images, so I'd just added one to the list!

    At this point things started getting very weird. I found that, even with a group of tracks (across 3 Albums) selected, all of which had the same cover art, MM would not show anything in the "edit album art" list.

    Worse, when I tried to remove an image, and apply the change to all the selected tracks, in fact the "apply to all tracks in the album" options was making the change to a random subset of the tracks.
In the end I had a horrendous mess, with some tracks with up to 4 cover art images. Worse, some of them ended up showing MULTIPLE copies of the "no album art assigned yet" image in the tag editor!

It took me about 2 hours to clean up every single track by hand and apply the correct, single, cover art image to it. No an experience I want to repeat.

1) Is MM just buggy in this area? How the heck can you HAVE multiple "no art applied" attributes on a single track, sometimes intermingled with real cover art images in the list?

2) The way the "apply to all tracks in the album" option works, when you have multiple tracks selected (that can be across MULTIPLE single-CD albums!) is far from clear.

Hints and tips much appreciated.
Regards: Colin
Lowlander
Posts: 56492
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2003 5:53 pm
Location: MediaMonkey 5

Post by Lowlander »

I'm not sure that MM is buggy, but certain things seem to cause problems.

I advice to always update 1 track at the time. This seems to not cause any problems with me. Make sure you do have Apply To all tracks on Album selected.

Doing multiple tracks together seems to result in problems for other users as well.
emalvick
Posts: 265
Joined: Tue May 15, 2007 9:44 am

Post by emalvick »

I would say Lowlander is probably right. I've had various, similar, problems with album art that extends beyond MM. Either all the programs I've tried are buggy or there are just some inconsistencies with how album art is implemented in the mp3 scheme.

I recently had a case where I had an image and wanted to replace it. I usually use MP3Tag (MM once corrupted all my tags when having a problem with album art and not just the album art tags)... Anyway, I tried to remove the problem art first and then add new art. While the art showed as removed, as soon as I added the new art, I was showing with 2 pieces of art (not just 1). I thought it might be a glitch, but MM and ID3Tag-It also showed the same thing. The bad thing is that ID3Tag-It and MM would not let me remove the original art because it was acting like it might be removed.... Well, the final solution was to strip all the tags off the mp3's and start over. Fortunately, it was only one album.

After my rant, what I am getting at is that no program seems to do a perfect job of dealing with album art, especially once you get to trying to replace it.

Erik
colin_e
Posts: 80
Joined: Thu Dec 28, 2006 6:39 pm

Post by colin_e »

Interesting. One reason I was (it seems) naively optimistic was that the "tag files from Amazon" option has so far been pretty reliable for me, generally applying album art correctly across multiple tracks.

However-

1) The Amazon option is almost always used with a single album (CD). It's possible this would screw up with my more complex "HitchHiker's" case.

2) The Amazon tagger doesn't have the confusing "apply to all files in this album" option. As I said, exactly what this should do when you have MORE than one album in the current selection is hard to understand.
Regards: Colin
Lowlander
Posts: 56492
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2003 5:53 pm
Location: MediaMonkey 5

Post by Lowlander »

Yes Autotag from Amazon works well with Album art. In your situation I advice to do by album and just for one track on the album.

When I manually update album art I always do it for one track and apply to all on album.
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