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[dmitch77]

I'm having trouble getting a Smartlist to recognize audio tracks that don't have artwork. I have a modified version of the stock "Audio - Missing Cover Art" smartlist; I added a couple of fields to exclude some tracks that I know don't have (and will never have) artwork. But lately - in the last month or two - I've been noticing tracks that don't have any artwork, aren't explicitly excluded from the Smartlist, but are still not displayed in the Smartlist.

The attached screenshots show an example. The first one, "let it rhyme.jpg", shows a track with no artwork. There is no thumbnail in the list view (yes I tried rebuilding the thumbnail, to no avail) and the tag display in the Action Window shows no image.

The second screenshot shows the smartlist in question, "Test empty cover art". The shot shows both the rules and the contents of the list, and it doesn't contain the "Let It Rhyme" track. The rules for the smartlist are

Media Type is Audio
Comment does not contain "__NO_ARTWORK__"
Image File is <empty>
Artist is not any <short list of excluded artists>

The track in question definitely does not contain a "__NO_ARTWORK__" comment, and its artist is not in the excluded group.

There are dozens of tracks in my library which have this problem. Sometimes it's all of the tracks on one album with no artwork. Sometimes it's on an album with just one track (which has no artwork). Sometimes it's an album with one track missing artwork and, and the rest of the tracks on the album have artwork. In all of these cases, the smartlist no longer catches the "missing artwork" tracks.

Any ideas as to what might be going wrong?

iMac, macOS 10.15, MC 25.0.108

[blgentry]

You might make a new smartlist that only shows files with [Image File] "is empty".  That way you can be sure if this file is triggering on that or not.

In a broader sense, you also might be interested in making a more sophisticated view to help you maintain your cover art.  I have a view I call "Cover Art Review", which has numerous features that I've used in the past when going through all of my cover art.  One of the features is a check box called "image approved".  I use this to filter out images that are "good enough" and I don't need to look at any more.  That might apply to some that I just can't get art for.  I mark them as "image approved".  Then, in my view, I have a Pane that I can toggle to show, or not show, my image approved files.  This is more dynamic and easier than maintaining a list of images, or having a Comment that I need to fill out.

I talk about this a little in this thread:

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,98325.msg701887.html#msg701887

Brian.

[dmitch77]

You might make a new smartlist that only shows files with [Image File] "is empty".  That way you can be sure if this file is triggering on that or not.

Yes, I tried that. Same problem. Lots of tracks with no cover art but which fail to show up in that basic smartlist.

[dmitch77]

Here's an interesting nugget that may or may not have anything to do with the problem. See attached screen shot. I got the Tag window to show where it thinks the cover art should be. It's beneath this folder:

~/Library/Application Support/J River/Media Center/Cover Art/....

 But that folder doesn't exist on my computer. And MC is configured to get is cover art from here:

~/Library/Application Support/J River/Media Center 25/Cover Art/....

There is indeed some cover art there, but not much. There is no "J River/Media Center/ folder, only ones with version numbers (Media Center 25, Media Center 24, etc.), as also shown in the screen shot. Why is MC trying to get cover art from a folder that doesn't exist?

[blgentry]

Well there's your problem.  MC has a record in it's database for the cover art for these files, even though it's not there.

You could catch all of those at once though:  Do a search (or smartlist entry) specifically looking for that folder.  That should find all of them.  When you find them, you should be able to erase the Image File field.  Then they will show up in  your smartlist.

Why is this entry there?  I have no idea.  Some kind of leftover from a previous library is my best guess.  But I don't know.   I know my library doesn't have that issue.  But again, I store all of my images INSIDE the files, so there's no directory structure to deal with.

Also, you might consider changing your cover art location to be "in the same folder as the file".  That way there's no central directory to mess with.  I don't really understand why that's the default.  It makes no sense to me personally.

Good luck.

Brian.

[dmitch77]

You could catch all of those at once though:  Do a search (or smartlist entry) specifically looking for that folder.  That should find all of them.  When you find them, you should be able to erase the Image File field.  Then they will show up in  your smartlist.

Yep, that was the secret sauce. It's so nice to have a fully searchable database. 

However the only way I was able to change the erroneous imagefile path was to assign new artwork to the relevant tracks (which was easy, once I was able to find and enumerate them). The "Manage Library Field" pane in options (see attached screen shot) shows "Image File" as being not editable, and with an unknown data type. And, Image File doesn't show up in Library Tools > Find & Replace. So, I could not find any way to manually erase, edit, or otherwise modify that bogus field...except by assigning new artwork. Is there another way to modify or delete this field if it happens to get munged in the future?

Thanks.

Doug

[blgentry]

I was trying to suggest that you go into the Tagging Window for those files with Edit > Tag.  Then find the [Image File] field and erase the contents of that for just those files.

The Manage Library Fields dialog edits the actual database tags.  If you can been able to remove Image File, it would have removed it from all of the database records!  Luckily you can't do that.  Luckily #2, MC makes database backups, so you could have gone back to a known good state pretty easily.

Getting back to what I was suggesting:  Using the Tag window.  Well... it doesn't work for [Image File]!  It's not user editable.  However you should be able to do something similar to erase the [Image File] from a bunch of files at once:  Highlight them and then  tools > Cover art > remove cover art .  That should erase the entry from all of those records making [Image File] empty.

But you really did the right thing:  You assigned cover art to these files that were "missing" their art.  Which is the whole point of this exercise.  Good job. 

Brian.

[dmitch77]

The Manage Library Fields dialog edits the actual database tags.  If you can been able to remove Image File, it would have removed it from all of the database records!  Luckily you can't do that. 

I know just about enough be to be dangerous, but I knew not to do that. I only looked at, and took a screen shot of, that Manage Library Fields pane to illustrate the fact that that field is not editable.

Ya learn something new every day, if you're lucky. Today, I was lucky. 

Doug