Art won't stick after rescan?

[Kelvin]

I had to move some folders around in my music folder, and had to clear the MM library and rescan afterward. After rescan, I lost at least half of my album art (probably about 400 images in all).

I've always been good about syncing tags after adding album art. Anyone know why the art disappeared? I have MM gold, and love it to death, but I can't keep adding art when it disappears.

[Eyal]

The reason is probably because the art was linked to filenames (not saved in tags).
The links became invalid when you renamed the folders or moved the images elsewhere...

[jimsocal]

I had to move some folders around in my music folder, and had to clear the MM library and rescan afterward. After rescan, I lost at least half of my album art (probably about 400 images in all).

I've always been good about syncing tags after adding album art. Anyone know why the art disappeared? I have MM gold, and love it to death, but I can't keep adding art when it disappears.

Are you sure the album art disappeared, or is it just not showing up because it's in Properties > Position 2 instead of Position 1. Try right clicking and see if you can find the art there in another position. (i.e. the album art window has room for a front, an inside and a back cover. In mine, many of my album covers are appearing in the 2nd position instead of what should be the default 1st position, so I have to manually point it to the art. A major pain when you have a thousand or so albums... I THINK this is a bug!

[kelvin]

No, there's nothing. That was one of the first things I checked. This is really disappointing, because I switched from foobar (which gave me zero problems) after hearing how great MM was, and paid for Gold. Now a good chunk of my art is gone, which will take god knows how long to replace.

The worst part is that yours is the only response I've received. I'm out the money, the art, and no one wants to try and help.

I run a music-related site, and when I post this year's media player competition, what can I say? Take my money, lose my art, don't even respond to my problem.

[Guest]

The reason is probably because the art was linked to filenames (not saved in tags).
The links became invalid when you renamed the folders or moved the images elsewhere...

I'm given 2 options when saving: save to tag or folder. I chose tag (which is the default). If that causes lost art, maybe it shouldn't be the default.

[Lowlander]

In my experience saving to the tag is the saver option as you never loose the association with the album art. When you save externally you can loose the relationship when moving files around.

[Lowlander]

The forum is user run with the occasional developer response. You can contact MediaMonkey by opening a support ticket.

After moving the files outside of MediaMonkey did you use Add/Rescan Tracks or Locate Moved/Missing? If the former did you delete the old entries of the songs (they should show grayed out)? If not you can do this from the Files to Edit > Dead Links node. Did you have album art that is missing embedded in the tags or stored externally?

[MPG]

If you have saved the images to the MP3 tag, then they should still exist in the mp3 file. Moving folder structures and such will not remove images from the files. Not unless the move corrupted the files.

Did you use MM to re-org or did you use Explorer?

Also, the save to tag option indicates that it will save to the tag unless it is unable to do so, then it will save it too a folder. By chance, the images weren't saved to a folder that was moved and so the link is no longer viable.

I save my images to the mp3 tag and have restructured a couple of times with complete success. Once with MM and once through Explorer. I know this doesn't help your problem, but does let you know that it has been done successfully.

Good luck.
MPG

[Guest]

After moving the files outside of MediaMonkey did you use Add/Rescan Tracks or Locate Moved/Missing? If the former did you delete the old entries of the songs (they should show grayed out)? If not you can do this from the Files to Edit > Dead Links node. Did you have album art that is missing embedded in the tags or stored externally?

I used add/rescan, and yes, I deleted the old entries first.

[Guest]

If you have saved the images to the MP3 tag, then they should still exist in the mp3 file. Moving folder structures and such will not remove images from the files. Not unless the move corrupted the files.

Did you use MM to re-org or did you use Explorer?

Also, the save to tag option indicates that it will save to the tag unless it is unable to do so, then it will save it too a folder. By chance, the images weren't saved to a folder that was moved and so the link is no longer viable.

I save my images to the mp3 tag and have restructured a couple of times with complete success. Once with MM and once through Explorer. I know this doesn't help your problem, but does let you know that it has been done successfully.

Good luck.
MPG

I used explorer to re-organize, cleared the library in MM, and then used add/rescan.

I've reorganized before using WMP, foobar, and winamp, all with no problems. Only MM has lost my art.

[Lowlander]

Try to see if other applications still can see the album art. Neither the moving of the files nor the Add/Rescan Tracks should have resulted in the loss of the embedded Album art. Can you confirm if the Album Art still exists in these tracks and thus the problem is that MediaMonkey doesn't recognize them or that the Album Art seemed to have disappeared which means the source of this issue needs to be identified.

[glennmaples]

Sometimes we are forced into using the file system even though MM is so much better.

Related thought that would make this easier to repair.

According to a recent post - Cover Art needs to be labeled with Front, Back or a couple of other names in order to be used by MM. Naming all your art Front.jpg is a disaster waiting to happen.

Is this true?

If so, why not
1) add jpgs as a supported MM data type.
2) Allow jpgs in a folder (to have have prefixes like H~ or D~) to indicate whether the file should hidden or displayed by MM
3) Then allow the property editor and auto-organize tools to rename the jpgs to correspond with the other files -- something like D~Beatles~White Album~Front.jpg

As long as I am not writing the code you could go ahead and rotate the images marked as display as the song plays.

BTW -- I LOVE MM!!!! But I hate trusting the MM database as the sole information linking images to albums. When the move goes OK life is good, but if you have a problem (bug or user) you could be looking at a LOT of time and effort to fix.

Perhaps in addition to images being supported like this you could also handle chord files, liner notes, associated video etc in a similar manner. I know it would be easier if everything had MP3 tags, but they don't. I wonder if we could store this stuff in mp3 file format and then use a custom mp3 tag to tell MM that it is an image not sound and let it handle calling the proper application??? Then EVERYTHING could be tagged.

-glenn

[Lowlander]

I'm not aware of MediaMonkey requiring a certain naming convention for Album art to work. All jpg, bmp and gif are recognized.

Using front, back, etc. in the filename (just a part of it) for MediaMonkey to auto-classify an album art's type (front, back, etc). As for external art this works best if all tracks of an album are in their own folder and that no other tracks from other albums are in that folder.

[glennmaples]

Lowlander --

The comment about art having to have certain names was taken from a thread I read recently, I bow to your knowledge, I should have checked myself before I repeated the belief. The last comment was not meant to be sarcastic--you are phenomenal!

I still think that MM could handle non-MP3 files much better. It seems to me that there are two methods to achieve this --either: 1) automate setting the file names of these files so that these names will change with the tags of the associated mp3s or 2) wrapping these files in an MP3 shell and let the MM application deal with wrapping and unwrapping transparently to the user. Sort of a SOAP for MP3.

Consider the ability to change the file name based on tags for MP#. This is a really good feature for MP3s -- If our collection really gets screwed up the ability to take information from tags and put it in the file name or vice versa is a critical redundancy. I spend more time trying to get artwork right than ripping MP3 files. So if the application could provide more safety here --it would be very helpful. Of course -- the application WILL find associated files if they are in the correct folder, but if I screw up the folder structure then I am truly screwed. When Media Monkey associates art with a particular folder it would be great if we could rename the jpegs to agree with the convention of my MP3s, then I can always easily put mp3s and jpegs back together. Or, if we could wrap jpegs etc in mp3 shells then I could just tag these like all the other mp3 files. Either way would be a huge improvement.

-glenn

[Lowlander]

In the Media Monkey options > Tags & Playlists you can set the filename for album art. This will only apply to album art that is being added but is a start. There is also a powerful album art script that might be able to do the same for existing external album art. This doesn't mean that a build in renamer for existing album art wouldn't be a useful addition.

As for other external files, MediaMonkey recognizes them when using Auto-Organize Files and asks if you want to move them along (thus not losing them). This only works when the whole all the tracks in a folder are moved. There might be scripts that allow some more actions like renaming.

As for maintaining external files it is a bad idea for 2 reasons. First the chance of loosing association, especially when moving the music files around. Secondly is retrieval of the information. A well designed database will work faster than reading external files. Of course external files would be required if the file format doesn't support the tag (for something like lyrics). Track based data can't use the space argument as storing per track externally or embedded should use about the same space. For album or artist data, think album art, the space argument is valid, but I would still advice embedding.