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[MusicHawk]

I'm doing lots of work with cover art, and keep wishing for a few shortcuts. (I'm fixing a variety of goofiness resulting from online lookups and some problems with cover.jpg showing up all over the place.)

It sure would be easier to add/change cover art if there were more/faster ways to directly access the Cover Art submenu, and/or directly edit the Image File field.

For comparison, the Tag dialog allows click-to-edit of almost all the fields that are under user control (vs. computed by MC) -- but not the Image File field. Nor does clicking the field open the Cover Art menu. In certain views and modes it's quite a few clicks to get to this.

The cover art actions I do 95% of the time are:
+ Paste in a cover art image from the Clipboard
+ Add a cover art image from a File

So, I'd love to see click or right-click and/or key-combination and/or Tag dialog and/or other fast ways to do these two things.

The other 5% of cover art actions? About 4% of the time I Remove the current cover art image because it's wrong and I don't have the correct image. About 1% of the time I try Get From Internet, since I've already done that and rarely get something new/more/better.

What cover art actions do other users do frequently? If we can find consensus on a few "popular" actions, it might help guide MC's designers to some UI tweaks.

My other cover art wish-list items:

+ more control over how MC automatically names and stores cover art images. For instance, Artist - Album isn't match how I name music files, so it's a bit of work to keep music and image coordinated. If cover art file names could be specified similar to "rename from properties", I'd name cover art files the same as music files, both based on properties, which in my system also puts them in subfolders.
+ drag-and-drop from file system to Image File field as alternative using Add an Image from a File. This dialog is really hard for me to work with because I have many thousands of image files already, and growing daily. With so many files, it's really twitchy to navigate the dialog's huge (for me) flat file list. Scrolling "one screen back" often jumps back dozens and dozens of files just because the ratio of scrollbar movement to file count is so high.

(I have a large, growing library so folder/file organization and naming conventions are essential to my sanity. I name folders by Artist, which is Lastname, Firstname, not by Album name, since much of my library is not derived from or even related to albums.)

[JimH]

When you have the tag window open in the Action Window, you can click on the image [or blank image] and paste there.  But maybe you know that.

[Alex B]

+ drag-and-drop from file system to Image File field as alternative using Add an Image from a File. This dialog is really hard for me to work with because I have many thousands of image files already, and growing daily. With so many files, it's really twitchy to navigate the dialog's huge (for me) flat file list. Scrolling "one screen back" often jumps back dozens and dozens of files just because the ratio of scrollbar movement to file count is so high.

This is already possible. Open AW > Tag and enlarge the small cover art thumbnail by clicking it. You can drag and drop cover art from Windows Explorer to this display.

EDIT

Jim beat me by eight seconds...

EDIT 2

... but he didn't mention "drag and drop".

[MusicHawk]

>> When you have the tag window open in the Action Window, you can click on the image [or blank image] and paste there.

I "sort of" know this. Unless I'm doing it wrong, it doesn't seem to consistently behave like this. Sometimes, it opens the view area in Thumbnails mode where I can see and manipulate the cover art image. But usually if I right-click on the small image spot where hover says "click for image view" it closes the Tag dialog and opens the Image dialog which either displays the current image or says "no image". I can then (non-obviously) click the upper-left "Tools" graphic to access the cover art menu items such as Paste. I don't see where I could paste directly if there's "no image".

Opening the image dialog CLOSES the Tag dialog, and it takes a mouse click on an X to close Image and reopen Tag. Contrast with Keywords, which can be closed via X-click OR Tab key to move to the next field. (I'm a keyboard person....)

Also, when clicking the image area in the Tag dialog, the view area sometimes switches from a Details view that I prefer (editing lots of details) to Thumbnail mode, so I then have to switch back. I can't readily reproduce this behavior but it happens.

My hope is to reduce the clicking and scrolling and jumping around, perhaps by having Image add/change possibly without leaving the Tag dialog, as with other Tag fields, and/or available via some shortcuts that would help when doing it over and over hundreds of times as I am.

The other thing that might be considered is the 80/20 of submenu options. In most menus that I use regularly, I do a few things a lot, and other things rarely or never. The question is, would most users agree on WHICH 20% of items are used 80% of the time? It's just a thought that maybe some menu options could be promoted (or given buttons or hotkeys or shortcuts) and others demoted, so it's faster to do certain very common things at the expense of special operations. I've done some rearranging of the built-in Playlists to this same end.

Please... what else am I overlooking?

[MusicHawk]

More cover art manipulation frustration...

I suspect there are ways to work with cover art that do NOT incur this problem, but it seems too easy to occur vs. very hard to un-do.

Scenario:

Let's say I have dozens of tracks by an artist. Some are from original albums, some from "greatest hits" and other collections, some random individual tracks. I want to give the original albums their original cover art. When a track is on an original album (often an LP) AND a greatest hits CD or other collection, I keep the best quality track, but want to retain the REAL album name it came from, AND give it the original album's cover art.

What happens is, when a cover image is Pasted in from the clipboard, therefore it has no name, MC names it using pattern Album Artist - Album name. I never use this pattern anywhere else, but it's built into MC's cover art system.

The problem is, I only want to retain one copy of a given song -- the best copy I have, whatever the source. For instance, I rip from LP to get 12 tracks, but also have 2 of them on a collection CD. So I want to end up with 10 tracks from the LP, plus the 2 tracks from the CD. But I don't want to give the CD tracks the name of the LP album because that's not where they came from.

To add cover art, I select all the tracks with the same Album name, then paste in that album's image. No problem.

However, I then paste the same album cover art into the two tracks from the CD collection, to recognize where they originated. Ooops -- this changes the cover art of ALL the tracks on the collection CD, because they all have the same Album name and that's how the cover art gets named automatically when Pasting.

And once the original art has been overwritten,  there's no un-do. I have to go get it again from another track or my source and paste it back in. But no, that just repeats the problem. So I save the cover art as an image file in a folder, give it a DIFFERENT name, then located it via MC's Add From File dialog (which is difficult to navigate with many files).

Obviously there are workarounds if I changed the order of steps or compromised on the Album name. (If you're curious, I do not want to store cover art in the music files, and I don't use folder.jpg because my folders are at the artist level, not by album.)

It just seems too delicate, to easy to change one file's cover art and have the unintended consequence of changing others, with no warning and no simple way to revert. In fact, the change to other tracks of the album is not knowable without looking at them, and they might not even be in the current view or tree leaf. And, the pasted-in image that got overwritten might have been the ONLY copy the user has on-hand (happened to me dozens of times: I put a cover image in months/years ago, then it inadvertently got overwritten by a different image that MC gave the same name, and I don't have the original image without digging into my backups, a tedious job).

An improvement would be to ask for verification when overwriting a cover image, and/or when renaming a cover image automatically. Also a Paste un-do would be wonderful, or second choice, an automatic rename of the about-to-be-overwritten image file (append _OLD" or something), just-in-case.

Part of the challenge is the notion of "cover art", which while being the usual source of a music file's image, is not always. The user might prefer images of artists, or still shots from videos, or other non-cover images -- many of them not tied in any way to an "Album" name.


The ultimate improvement would be allowing user-specified "rename cover art file from properties", same as is allowed for "rename files from properties" -- rename a file, create/change a subdirectory, even move the location -- all based on music file properties. This could be used to allow all manner of image file organization, and provide several ways to avoid cross-track image interaction, while still supporting the current album-oriented naming style for those who prefer it. In other words, allow for image files exactly the same file-level control as for music files.


PS: An extreme example exists on my system. I have hundreds of tracks with a cover art image of Linda Ronstadt's spanish-language album, because it somehow got on my system with name Cover.jpg and these tracks all have that name in the Image File field. I deleted Cover.jpg but the images still appear for all the tracks, presumably due to caching, unless I select each track and delete the image reference. If this is not due to caching, then it likely is due to the images being stored in the music tracks (MP3) though for a long, long time I've had MC set to NOT store images in tracks. Even when set this way, sometimes it seems to do it, or maybe not "not" do it (I already reported a problem with MC transferring images to my iPod even when told not to.)

[rossp]

Could I also add that MC should keep the Folder.jpg and cover art inside the mp3 tag consistant. If I get cover art from the internet then the Folder.jpg is created. If I import mp3's with cover art embedded in them then the Folder.jpg is not created. I want the cover art inside and in the Folder.jpg local file so explorer works correctly.

Rgds...Ross

[hit_ny]

Reading through and wondering whether Musichawk is aware that...

...if there is only *one* jpg per folder then MC will automatically choose it as the cover art for all the files in that folder. No more work required.

Now if after MC's picked the cover art, i don't think it minds if you add more into the folder later.

Course this means work outside of MC but it seems ether way you do it there's going to be some

This is the hard part when you introduce your music collection to MC, gets easier later on.

[MusicHawk]

Thanks for the comments....

>> ...if there is only *one* jpg per folder then MC will automatically choose it as the cover art for all the files in that folder. No more work required.

I know this, but my library isn't organized by album folders, since I have MANY non-album tracks. To use "one .jpg per folder" I'd need a zillion folders (well, almost -- 72,000 tracks and growing). Instead, I'm hoping for properties-based control over image-file naming, as we already have for music-file naming.

>> This is the hard part when you introduce your music collection to MC, gets easier later on.

I've been using MC since MJ7 (as indicated by having 72K music tracks already loaded), but the image-file-naming rigidity and time-consuming workaround has made it hard to make much use of the Cover Art feature.

[hit_ny]

What if you treat images like mp3's ?

filter viewschemes to just show all the cover art and think if them as you would mp3s.

Would that make naming them any easier ?