Okay. I figured it out.
I use
album artist in a way that I don't think most people do. For the
artist field, the name as ripped/downloaded (ordered firstname/lastname) auto populates the
artist field. For me personally however, I simply must have artists sort by lastname first - and that is what I use the
album artist field for. In fact, I actually give that the
album artist field the proxy name of "Artist Sort".
For example, for artist
Chet Atkins, the name auto-populates the
artist field as
Chet Atkins upon rip/download. I then manually enter
Atkins, Chet for
album artist. A huge chunk of my library consists of artists that are simply the artist's name, manually reordered to lastname/firstname for the
album artist field. Now let's consider artists names that include their own name AND a band name.
The examples below are very similar, but are different in a specific way that results in one getting an artist image and the other does not.
- Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. The artist field is (automatically) filled with that exact full name, but for album artist, I manually enter Seger, Bob
- Big Head Todd and the Monsters. In this case, I use the full name for both artist and album artist, as there is no last name used in the artist/band name, so there is nothing to reorder.
Since
artist and
album artist match exactly for the
Big Head Todd example, it loads an artist image. But the
Bob Seger example fails, as they are different values. Making this correlation was entirely non-obvious, since
artist/album artist fields are
also "not equal" for just a basic artist name (for example,
Chet Atkins is not identical to Atkins, Chet). For whatever reason, artist images will load for that scenario, but not for artist name + band name, unless
identical values are used for both
artist/album artist.
Except... Wouldn't you know it, there is an exception for that as well!
I have a bunch of albums by
Lyle Lovett. For most of the albums the
artist name is
Lyle Lovett. For several other albums, the
artist name is
Lyle Lovett and His Large Band. For ALL of these albums, I manually enter
Lovett, Lyle for
album artist. In this case, MC loads an artist image (for
Lyle Lovett), and when I click on that image, it shows ALL the albums (for both
Lyle Lovett,
AND Lyle Lovett and his large band) which is very nice. So apparently, as long as one album with an
artist field of firstname/lastname coupled with an
album artist of lastname/firstname, the rest of the albums can have an
artist/album artist mismatch and MC will still load an image.
I think this is why in the post I linked to someone concluded that artist names with "and" or special characters in them cause problems. I have confirmed with 100% repeatability, special characters are not the issue. While the word "and" does indeed show up in most of the artist names that won't load images, it has nothing to do with the word "and" (or &) itself. It is the mismatch between the
artist/album artist fields. My guess is that the person who thought that might be the cause, perhaps uses the same sorting approach that I do with the album artist field, and thus encountered the image won't load issue for artist names with "and" in them. For completeness, I guess I should note that standard band names such as Steely Dan, the Beatles, etc. load artist images without issue since I use the same exact value for both
artist/album artist.
FYI… In my initial post where I asked "does anyone know how to completely/permanently remove stubborn cover art"- that was poorly worded and misleading. I
am able to remove the cover art with MC - and I did, from every single file - and then rewrote all the tags with empty image files. But even after all of that, the artist image in the artist image folder still would not load for a seemingly random smattering of artists. For this reason, I assumed that had to be some stubborn embedded cover art that was preventing artist images from loading. But as I explained above, I now know it has nothing to do with that!
My naming/sorting approach has worked very well for many many years now. However, the way MC handles artist images conflicts with my naming approach for about 5% of my library. I have a couple of ideas for a work around that will allow me to load artist images for every single artist, but I will save that for another post.
Hopefully this little novella will help anyone else who has experienced similar issues.