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[boliver]

Is there any way of showing a slideshow of different ablum art in the Track Info area when playing a song?

I downloaded the plugins, "Slide Show" and "Simple Slide Show" and put my art in an "art" folder within the directory of the  .ape files of the related album.

But there are two problems:

1.  When the slideshow starts, I get an alert that says something like "IE is not sure about this ActiveX control, do you want to play it or not?"  This alert comes up for each song:  making use of this plugin too tedious to use

2.  (More importantly) None of the art in the "art" folder is displayed.  Only the embedded art for that ape file is played (which is often wrong since it was found automatically by MC over the internet).  Do I have the "art" folder in the right place???

I am using latest version of MC 12.

Any help would be wonderful.

Bill

[Alex B]

1. I have not tried those plugins with MC12. However, the ActiveX warning comes from the MS Internet Explorer browser engine which is used by MC. Maybe there is way to tell I.E. to consider this control permanently as safe.

2. MC has two default location options for cover art. The default location can be either the audio file folder or a single common folder. Subfolders are not automatically used. The cover art options are in Tools > Options > File Location > Cover Art. In there you can also disable the "store in file tags" option if you prefer to have only linked cover art.

If your files have wrong cover art you can fix that problem. You can relink cover art from your "art" subfolder manually (Select the album files > Right-click > Cover Art > Add From File...).

Personally I would move (or copy) the cover art files to the audio file folders and do the following steps inside MC:
1. Select the files
2. Right-click > Cover Art > Remove Cover Art
2. Right-click > Cover Art > Quick Find in File / Cover Art Directory

The "Quick Find..." command works only if the file folder contains only one image file or if there is more than one image file the preferred file is named as folder.jpg or [Artist] - [Album].jpg.

[boliver]

>The "Quick Find..." command works only if the file folder contains only one image file or if there is more than one image file

So there is no way to make an automatic slideshow of multiple images?

[Alex B]

I use "manual" slideshows:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=32482.msg223410;topicseen#msg223410
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=33953.msg231763;topicseen#msg231763

This post has a lot of links to my old cover art related posts:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=42646.msg290527#msg290527

[boliver]

I enabled every possible security option on IE and I still get the alert for the slideshow.

Alex B: I didn't understand your "manual" slideshow post.  I have almost 100K music files with directories of cover art.  Isn't there any way to just show these images in succession?

[Alex B]

Alex B: I didn't understand your "manual" slideshow post.  I have almost 100K music files with directories of cover art.

I guess you didn't read the linked posts.

I have about 45000 audio files and over 10000 related cover art images (front, back, disk, liner notes etc) in main main MC library. MC can display images in a slideshow during music playback. I have created several view schemes that can show the album related audio files and the music files side by side. When I play complete albums I normally use one of these view schemes and play all album related files together as I explained in this post:

The only reason I have several album images imported is MC's ability to play them in a slideshow during music playback. Besides tagging the image files I use my "All Media" view scheme for sending the music files together with image files to Playing Now.

At other times I use audio only view schemes as well.

Here are the screenshots from the "sorting problem" thread:

A library view:



Playing Now after a right-click>play on the album image stack (the sorting issue is resolved now):



The album images play in a slide show. The slideshow can be paused and the images can be enlarged for reading the texts. Often I set MC's display to TV out and display the images on the big screen.

You can also crete playlists that contain audio files and image files as I explained here:

When I add new CDs I tag the images and docs at the same time. So it's not much more work to do. Also, I don't usually mass move my albums (not anymore - I am happy with my current system), but I have found the imported and tagged album image files useful in many ways.

For example, I am playing this playlist now:



These files make an Alice Cooper compilation named "The Beast of Alice Cooper". I have not actually bought this album, but I have all original main albums. Because I liked the track selections I recently gathered the "Beast of" tracks with the corresponding main album images to this playlist. I also downloaded and added the "Beast of" front and back covers.

When I play this playlist the PN display looks like this:
(The animated file is about 0.5 MB, so it may take some time to load.)

Isn't there any way to just show these images in succession?

MC does not have an automatic system for what you ask.
For using my system you need to import and tag the image files too. I have done that for years.

The third party plug-ins you mentioned are supposed to do what you want automatically, but they are rather old and the I.E. security features have changed since the plug-ins were created.

[boliver]

I think I understand what you are doing.  but I don't have time to individually tag 100K files...

I was hoping either MC or a plugin could do this.  It doesn't seem like a big deal to program and I'm sure MANY people would use the feature if offered.

[Alex B]

I didn't do it at once. I started three years ago and I'm now about half way through. I do it album by album when I'm in the right mood. If an album doesn't have a set of image files I just show the standard linked front cover.

If you don't want to import the image files you can simply browse the album files by directories in the Drives & Devices part of the tree and right-click play the complete folder. The possibly included images will start a new slideshow.

In case you want to try importing you might be able to pull to the Artist and Album tags automatically from the directory structure with the Fill Properties From Filename tool. Only these two tags are needed for basic Artist-Album browsing.

However, I agree that a display plugin that would start a slideshow of all images that happen to be in the audio file folder would be a nice add. It has been requested a few times. (... more often than the new "Cover Art" mode in the build 386, which has not been requested.)

[boliver]

>I agree that a display plugin that would start a slideshow of all images that happen to be in the audio file folder would be a nice add

It just seems like a no brainer:  the code for slide shows and controlling slide shows is already done and working including code for displaying all types of images.  I can't imagine this feature taking more than a day of coding/testing.

[PeterO]

Hi all, Yes, there is such a MC slideshow plugin since 2004, created by "miscn4te".  Have just discovered it :-)  even I am using MC since 2005.


It is working fine even in Theater mode and it displays not even the pictures in the Artist/Album folder, it includes the Artist folder as well.
If you have a special "Art" Folder under Artist/Album then you can specify that as well.

Be careful !!! You have to enable Active X for IE for My Computer, because MC is using IE. The security level is lowered !  I am using Vista and Safari Browser for all my Internet Browsing, so I do not see an issue for me.

Have added two lines in the js code to display only picture over a certain size (Size is a parameter and can be set individually, currently I am using 10kB)

If somebody has an idea how to choose the minimum pixels , please tell me. I am very bad in Javascript.

Please see the changed code inside SlideShow.js

best regards
Peter

// Copyright (c) 2003, Nathan A. Sweet. All rights reserved.

var SlideShow = {};

// These variables can be edited.
SlideShow.minImageDisplaySeconds = 10; // Default is 45 sec
SlideShow.maxTrackImageWidth = 1280;
SlideShow.maxTrackImageHeight = 720;
SlideShow.minTrackImageHeight = 300;    //  Image will be resized to reach this min size

SlideShow.skipTrackImageSize = 10000;   // Image must be equal or greater this size (in byte) to be displayed (this does not affect the image inside the mp3  // added by PeterO

......
......

SlideShow.storeArtImageFolder = function ( fileSystem, folderPath ) {
   var artFolderPath = fileSystem.buildPath( folderPath, SlideShow.artFolderName );
   if ( !fileSystem.folderExists(artFolderPath) ) return;  // Check if ART  Subfolder is existing. If yes, then continue with next line
   
   var artFolder = fileSystem.getFolder( artFolderPath );
   var files = new Enumerator( artFolder.Files );
   while ( !files.atEnd() ) {
      var file = files.item();
      switch ( fileSystem.getExtensionName(file.path) ) {
      case "jpg":
      case "jpeg":
      case "gif":
      case "bmp":
      if (file.size >= SlideShow.skipTrackImageSize ) {
         // Skip file if it has  a size in byte below the value in variable SlideShow.skipTrackImageSize  // added by PeterO
         SlideShow.artImages[ SlideShow.artImages.length ] = file.path;
         
         }
         
      }

      files.moveNext();
                }
}