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[donlboy]

I want to make an audio playlist with still images interspersed with the songs - one image between various pairs of the songs. Ideally when a song finishes, the playlist/slideshow would move on to the following picture. When I am ready to move to the next song I would use the "next" button. I tried inserting a single jpg image between two songs in an existing playlist. When the song before the picture finished the playlist moved to the next song, skipping over the picture. When I double clicked the  picture it came up fine - and the first song in the playlist started playing! In Display View the image I inserted is what shows for all songs in the playlist, even though each song has its own cover art.

Do I need to find a different approach or change some settings or is what I want to do not possible?

[HPBEME]

I imagine you are already aware, but just in case... there are a couple of ways to automatically display artist images.
 
In Theater View mode, MC automatically grabs artist images from the internet and rotates them every 30 seconds while a songs play. It also does a nice fade-out/fade-in transition.  The downloaded images get stored in .DAT files here: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 28\Cache\Theater View Background.  I have no idea how you would extract images from the file however - I think each DAT file consolidates the images per artist?

In display view (or just the regular Playing Now Window) right click on the cover art and select Artist Images from the context menu.  This also cycles artist images, but the transition is a hard cut for this scenario.  I don't know where these Artist Images are stored.  I know I read in a thread a few years back that you can add your own images to a folder specifically to support this function, but I forget where the folder is (I never used it myself).  If you search the forum for Artist Images I imagine you will find a thread that talks more about it.

That said, for both options you are somewhat at the mercy of whatever MC uses for the artist images shown (but maybe not with the 2nd option). If you want to show only specific artist images for specific songs, this does not really solve that. That may be possible to make work, but I don't know how.  Anyway, hope you or others find the info useful.

[donlboy]

Thanks for the good information about cover art and artist images. I should have been more clear about exactly what I want to do. We hold occasional themed music evenings where we do some fairly serious listening - the story being told by the song, the harmonies, the instruments, etc. After a song finishes I want an image that I have selected to come up on the screen to replace the cover art that was there while the song was playing. While this image is up we will discuss the song that just played and someone will then explain the next song in the playlist. When we are ready for the next song we would just use the "Next" button to move ahead. This would continue through the playlist. The image inserted between each song might be the same each time, or different, but will be relevant to the theme of the playlist. As we have done these events in the past we either have to pause at the end of the completed song, which leaves up the cover art for that song, which is not ideal when we are discussing the upcoming song, or let it move to the next song and then pause it, which is also not good when discussing the just completed song. No, this isn't a big deal, but it would make a smoother and more professional flow if we could insert images as I described. BTW, I have mostly abandoned use of artist images since they are often not for the artist being played due to confusion of names, especially for lesser-known artists.

[HPBEME]

Great update on your exact use case - that should help someone who is a playlist expert (which I am not  ) target exactly what options may be available.  It seems like you should be able to (successfully) mix pictures in with audio in a playlist, but I have never done that myself.  Hopefully someone else will chime in with a solution.  Good luck!

[dtc]

I reproduced the exact same behavior.  When an image is inserted into a playlist of audio tracks, it gets skipped when playing the playlist. And, if I click on the image, the first song in the playlist starts playing.  For some reason, the playlist is not handling the image properly.  I had a somewhat analogous situation with a single video placed in a playlist of images. In that case the transition from image to video crashed MC. Matt fixed that.  This case looks like it also is related to the playlist logic of transitioning from one media type to another.

MC 28.0.92 on Windows 10.

[donlboy]

Thanks for that, hopefully it will get someone's attention.

[dtc]

I just tried inserting a video into the playlist before the image and that plays. But, going from the video to the image, the image gets skipped.  I guess you could create a short video of an image and insert that and pause it for as long as you want. Or just use an existing video for now.  It seems the playlist does not like the image, maybe because it has no duration.

[Matt]

I just made a playlist of images and audio and playing any file works.  It starts playing the images as a slideshow and the audio is playing in Playing Now.

Double-clicking an image jumps to Display View.  Double clicking an audio file starts playback of the images but doesn't jump the view.

I'm using the latest build of MC28 x64 for Windows.

[HPBEME]

Matt, that is how it works for me as well, but the OP wants the mixed audio/image playlist to work in a very specific way, which is not at all how MC currently does it.

After a song finishes I want an image that I have selected to come up on the screen to replace the cover art that was there while the song was playing. While this image is up we will discuss the song that just played and someone will then explain the next song in the playlist. When we are ready for the next song we would just use the "Next" button to move ahead. This would continue through the playlist. The image inserted between each song might be the same each time, or different, but will be relevant to the theme of the playlist.

I really think dtc is onto what might be driving it - he deduced it might be related to the Duration tag, i.e,  images do not have a "duration", while songs & videos do.

[dtc]

I just made a playlist of images and audio and playing any file works.  It starts playing the images as a slideshow and the audio is playing in Playing Now.

Double-clicking an image jumps to Display View.  Double clicking an audio file starts playback of the images but doesn't jump the view.

I'm using the latest build of MC28 x64 for Windows.

I took an audio only playlist and just added 1 image in the middle. That gave me the behavior above.

[dtc]

I think I understand the issue. Mixed playlists are set to play audio and imagines as separate streams. So, if the first item in the playlist is an audio track, it starts playing that and also displays the first image in Display View, even if that image in quite a way into the playlist, even the last item in the playlist. And if the playlist is a slideshow of mostly images, it shows those images as a slide show but it also plays the audio files in the playlist as soon as the images start.  This is a nice feature if you want to have music during your slideshow or to display images during your audio playlist. 

However, in this case the idea is to have the playlist continuous, independent of media type. So, the audio playlist would play with cover art displayed and when the playlist gets to the image file, then it would display that and not start playing audio again until some time passed or the image was paused and unpaused.
 
So, is there any way to do the latter?

EDIT : I guess one solution is to create a silent audio track with cover art of the image to be displayed. That can be paused during playback without affecting anything else. That way, MC just sees one long audio playlist and plays it sequentially.

[HPBEME]

Launching/playing an image slide show while playing audio is awesome and have used that ever since I started using MC.  I just have never tried to insert images directly into an audio playlist like the OP wants.

That said, dtc's suggestion to create a silent audio clip and then apply whatever image you want as the "cover art" is an excellent work around.  One could easily duplicate a silent audio clip 10, 20, 100 times as needed and assign sequential numbers to the identical silent sound clips.  The clip could be 5 or 10 seconds long... whatever the OP thinks is enough time to hit pause before advancing inadvertently.

He could then create a special folder "Audio Theme Images" for all the silent clips, assign any images he wants as cover art, and finally rename the audio clips to something that makes sense.  Obviously this would require some work, but once the process is worked out, I imagine it would go pretty fast.  Not preferable to having a built-in MC solution, but I have a feeling that would not come anytime soon, if at all.

[donlboy]

Thanks DTC, Matt and HPBEME. I had previously tried creating a silent track with the image I wanted as cover art. The problem was that the track didn't stay "silent" - I use volume leveling for the playlists and it tried to crank up the level of the track to match the music. It required me to pause the "silent"  track very quickly to avoid a burst of noise. I asked in a separate post "Analyze Audio/Volume Leveling - Skip for One File?" if there was a way to avoid this but have not received a reply. It feels like we might be on track to a solution.

[dtc]

How about a normal audio file but with silence or very low level at the beginning?

[donlboy]

dtc - Genius! That works great. This board is a goldmine.

[dtc]