Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[keithw]

I've had a problem several times in the past 12 months (and therefore with MC24 and MC25) where a large batch of tracks seems spontaneously to have been set to a single piece of cover art.

When this first happened I put it down to error on my part - I could not figure out how I had accidentally change the images on around 10,000 tracks (my library has 190,000+ tracks).  I guessed I must have done something silly although I couldn't figure out any pattern which might suggest that I had inadvertently selected a batch (such as all works by a given artist/composer, or all works in a particular folder).  The undo function wasn't available.

I've noticed this has happened a couple of times during the year, generally with much smaller batches of tracks (although certainly into the four figure range).  Again, no obvious pattern, but on those instances, I did not notice the event until long after it had happened.

The same thing has just  occurred, and I am reaching out for any suggestions.  My observations:

a) 1,460 tracks were changed
b) the artwork installed was almost certainly on my clipboard - I had updated the correct album with that artwork last Friday.  That was almost certainly the case in previous events.
c) I was nowhere near my computer when the updating started (based on the date modified)
d) as with last year's event, no undo option was available, and MC crashed when I tried to select any of the tracks
e) I can see no pattern or reason for those tracks to have been chosen, although it does seem to have affected all tracks in the albums impacted

If anyone has any insights into what might be going on here, Id be grateful.  If you have any suggestions for how to restore the overwritten artwork, that would be wonderful.

If any further information would be useful, do let me know.
 

[blgentry]

You should check some of these files that have changed artwork.  Look at where MC thinks their artwork is located.  One easy way is to open the Tagging Pane (Edit > Tag) and look at the image section.

That might give you (and us) some clues as to what's going on.

You should also decide what your artwork strategy is.  Meaning, do you want all of your cover art in a central directory?  Or stored in each album directory with the music files?  Do you like MC to write the art inside the music file also?  All things to consider.

Brian.

[keithw]

Brian

I have this set up to store artwork in the library file, and to write the art inside the music file - see attached.

I can confirm that both the artwork in the JRiver folder and the music file were changed.

If you think there are better ways of setting this, I'd be glad to hear your advice.

Keith

[blgentry]

Ok, so you're using a central folder for artwork.  I wonder if you're having a name conflict there or something.

Go to a few of the files that have changed cover art.  Open the Tagging Pane (Edit > Tag).  Now look at the image section.  Look at the bottom under the image to see where the image is located. 

Since you have it set to write inside the media file, you might only see "inside file".  That wouldn't help us much.  If that's what you see, then use Finder to go to the folder you listed in your screenshot:  The centrally located cover art directory.  Go see if you can find the album cover by name.

It's hard to figure out exactly what's going on here.  I do not use a central image folder.  I set MC to write the cover art into the Album folder; I also have it set (as you do) to write the image into the music file.

...and doing this over 5 versions of MC I have never had cover art get replaced or changed without my doing so.  ...which makes it a bit harder for me to figure out what might be going on with your setup.

I wish you good luck.

Brian.

[keithw]

I'm even more confused!  The initial large overwrite has images inside the file.  The larger one from early summer has the images in the JRiver cover art folder; and this week's event has the images inside the file.  I can't see anything obvious around file name formats or likely conflicts.

Anyway, for this week's event, what I can see in the cover art folder is that the problem image exists as a jpg 263 times, each with a different, but correct, filename that reflects the album.  What I can also tell is that the changes appear to have been made in alphabetical order (artist-album) - that is, when I sort the files by date/time last modified, the files appear in alphabetical order (as attached).  When I sort the tracks in MY by date modified, the batch of tracks is  in MC, the filenames also are in strict alphabetical order, starting from the drive name where each is stored.

There's also an apparent time lag - the changes in art work run from 12.47pm through 3.10pm; in MC the changes started at 3.11pm and ran through to 4.10pm. 

One other thing which may be a relevant factor - shortly before all of this happened, I added five folders of MP3 tracks to MC - these were downloads from Amazon, with around 150 tracks each.  MC shows their import concluding a few minutes before the unexpected event.   In their case, the artwork is inside the file, but nothing is in the cover art folder.

[psp]

I have the same problem.  I have hundreds of CDs, imported into iTunes, and then auto-imported into mac versions of MC v18... out to v24 (currently playing).  Some months ago (June?) I noticed that many of my albums (CDs) had simultaneously acquired the same (wrong) cover art.  I did not knowingly change any tags or anything else, but I might have accidentally "fat fingered" an unknown change.

To my knowledge, the problem has only occurred once, all "wrong" art albums are the same cover, and all tracks in a "bad art" album are bad, all tracks in a "correct art" album are correct.

The original iTunes files all have the correct cover art. 

I am a busy guy and listen to music while I work, and then "just listen to music" because I like music; I really don't mess with the MC software much.  I'm tempted to delete everything MC-related and re-import the iTunes files again, but I don't want to spend a week troubleshooting MC to get my music back.  What's the best way forward?

Pete

[bob]

I don't really know what's going on here but I'd turn off the options storage of the cover art into the file tag and auto-lookup of cover art for files missing it upon playback.

[psp]

Thanks, will do.  Please advise if/when you have more info.  / Pete

[psp]

I can say though that many albums with existing (correct) cover art were overwritten with the same (Famous Blue Raincoat) cover art.

[bob]

Just fishing for hints,
Is is the Jennifer Warnes or Leonard Cohen cover?

[psp]

Jennifer Warnes, see attached scan.  Essentially all of my artwork was "found" by iTunes.  I'm computer literate, but really busy, so I don't go looking for unnecessary adventure.

I greatly appreciate your help,
Pete

[songsequencer]

I want to chime in here that I'm having the same kind of problem. I started a thread on it recently, which can be found here:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,122416.0.html

It has been driving me crazy.  At one point, when I was trying to correct the artwork, MC25 would keep overwriting it with the wrong one.  I would see the wrong image flash on my desktop and then overwrite my album cover art.