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[chriswale]

Recently I decided to make all the images for my music pictures of the artists instead of pictures of the albums. In my opinion, album art is geared more towards branding a CDs in a shop and not so useful for digital music lists. 

I prefer browsing my music by artist and a list of all their songs by date released. Anyway, most of the time I don't even keep all the tracks on an album, otherwise I would have 300000 songs.

But, I wouldn't mind having the option of both pictures, a picture of the artist and a picture of the album!  anyone know if this is possible?

[bunglemebaby]

At best you could store the Artist photo as a second photo for every song by each Artist. I don't know much about how MC supports multiple photos or if you could do anything with them, but you can definitely store multiple photos for each artist.

Also, explore some of the Playing Now skins, as some will automatically retrieve Artist images from places like Last.FM and display them during playback.

Generally this is one of the many little reasons why a relational database would be incredibly awesome. In that case you could have one picture related to each artist, one picture related to each album, even one picture related to each genre and so on and so forth.

-JB

[chriswale]

I can't work out how to add another image field, for artist image. anyone have any ideas?

[MusicHawk]

I don't know how to store multiple images per track, or if it is possible, but it raises the challenge of working around MC's Album-oriented approach to images -- made clear by the term Cover Art, rather than Track Art.

My wish is that the Cover Art lookup system would allow some options to better control Album art, and also Track art. Perhaps others will jump in with improvements or corrections to my understanding of how it now works and might be improved.

Right now Cover Art lookup either finds nothing, or it finds what is already on the local drive that matches the album track (presumably by album name + artist name), then it finds the same on the Internet, and if there are multiple choices it allows choosing one. That's a big help, but it doesn't handle all the situations I regularly encounter.

Wish #1: Allow choosing NONE, so in the Cover Art dialog it's possible to skip image choices that are simply wrong. This might be combined with the ability to delete a totally wrong image from the album and/or file system. The workaround is to let MC use an image, make a note of the track, then later go to that track and Remove the cover art image.

Wish #2 is for the Cover Art lookup, whether showing some "found" images or not for an Album, to also allow browsing the local drive in case there's already a better image that it didn't find. This would almost always be the case if there's an artist image that isn't named per some Album title. The workaround is to do this later and manually update selected tracks. But see "Challenge" below.

Wish #3, perhaps an alternative to #2, is for the Cover Art lookup to allow pasting in of an image from the clipboard, so when it doesn't find a desirable image through its automated search, the user can jump to a file manager or web browser, locate an image, return to the Cover Art dialog, and ADD that image on the spot. Again the workaround is to go to the track later and do this.

CHALLENGE: MC's Cover Art behavior, even when updating tracks manually, creates a challenge where the user isn't happy to assign the same image to all tracks of a given Album. What's missing is some way to specify that a given track's image is NOT associated with the Album name. This would allow any Album track to receive and retain an arbitrary image, such as an artist photo. Right now if the image is changed for one track of an Album, instantly ALL the tracks of that Album get changed to that image because it is assumed to be the Album's image, not the track's image. That's probably desirable in many cases, but certainly not all. It can be rather horrifying to see the prior image disappear from tracks that were not intentionally being changed. It can be quite difficult to find and restore the deleted image. There's no obvious way to prevent this other than to delete the track's Album name before changing its image, rather drastic.

[hit_ny]

The answer to your other question is No. You can only assign one image to any audio file. Either its any art or a default (configurable) no-cover image.

In my opinion, album art is geared more towards branding a CDs in a shop and not so useful for digital music lists. 

I've not heard this view before  ?

Album art to me represents the album that a track comes from. Whether its digital or not won't change which album it came from. The artist's preferred visuals for the audio

Or are you talking about independent digital tracks that do not have any specific cover-art associated, in that case i agree maybe the artist image might be more appropriate. And you could certainly assign the artist's image with these.