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[dcwebman]

This has been brought up before but I don't think I have ever seen a definitive solution. Most of my cover art is stored in the cover art folder and some are inside the MP3's. Occasionally when I go to play a song, I discover that it can't find the cover art in the cover art folder and sure enough it's gone. Where to, I don't know. I really don't want to put all the cover art inside the MP3's and I don't want to use the folder.jpg solution either. It would be nice to find out why I keep losing cover art but in the meantime, here is my question.

How can I find out with a smartlist or whatever that it can't find the file in the cover art folder? I was thinking the library browser might do it but I renamed one of the cover art files and it still showed the thumbnail so that isn't it. Instead of listing all my audio files and going one by one and looking at the image shown in the bottom left, there has to be an easier way to find out which ones MC can't find now.

Jeff

[datdude]

I have had numerous problems with the cover art directory.

If you right click the pane view and edit view scheme, add the 'image file' view item to the list!

[dcwebman]

Thanks for the reply. I had already done that but that just tells what the image file assigned to the MP3 is, not if the file actually exists and MC can find the file.

Any other way?

[GHammer]

Occasionally when I go to play a song, I discover that it can't find the cover art in the cover art folder and sure enough it's gone. Where to, I don't know. I really don't want to put all the cover art inside the MP3's and I don't want to use the folder.jpg solution either.

Oh, the 'folder.jpg' is no solution. It is how I have things arranged here and I still "lose" cover art. Fortunately the folder.jpg is still in the same place. MC shows the correct path when I look at a selection file properties. It just won't show again until I do a manual add from file.

I'd be interested in a way to find which files are mising cover art according to MC. The problem as I have it is that MC in one place has cover art assigned to the file. But the display portion ignores or doesn't see the same info.

So, when you check via a smartlist or any other method I've tried, you do not get valid results. Meaning that there will be files that do not display though other functions in MC think they do have cover art associated.

[GHammer]

Out of curiousity, I used another tool to find files that had cover art embedded.
I used the same tool to strip the cover art out of those files and save the images to disk.

I see that some of the selections had two and three identical files embedded in the tag.

I imported the image files into MC, and for the same file from selections from the same album, some images are listed as type "jpeg", some as "jpg".

I have no idea on this because I always go to AMG and save their cover art image. It is always saved as folder.jpg.  I then used MC to find the art.

Anyway, here's what I have done to try to figure out this recurring problem:

1- Stripped images from all audio files. No tool including MC shows embedded cover art now.

2- There were many Cover Art (Front) tags in APE and APL files. I have removed all these from all files.

3- Cleared the MC library with the reset option selected.

4- Emptied the MC thumbnails.

5- Deselected "save cover art inside tags when possible".

6- Imported again.

7- Rebuilt all smartlists and playlists.

8- Backup the library.


Every folder for every album has its art as folder.jpg and all those are jpg files.

For now, all is well. Every selection played has shown its cover and the library browser has correct art too.

So now the ball is in MCs court. If all stays well behaved, then I'll chalk it up to WMP deciding to tag files while using it to watch videos. I have disabled any file updates in WMP. However, WMP does not do APE/APL so that would not explain those tags.

No matter, with every file clean, every folder having proper art as folder.jpg if something changes I can say for sure what changed it and what the changes were.

More later!

[dcwebman]

Please keep us updated on any changes. I'm still using the cover art folder. On my one small library, 2600 files, I stripped out all images inside any MP3's so that all the cover art is in that one folder. I went through the cover art folder to make sure that only the ones actually used are in there and deleted the others.

I then manually, since I couldn't find a plug-in or automated way to do it, copied each cover art file (jpg's only) to each artist - album folder with the same filename, i.e. Artist - Album.jpg. Since I'm still referring to the cover art folder in MC, I'm hoping that if I lose any more cover art, I can easily recover it from the artist - album folder.
Jeff