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[MusicHawk]

As for cover art lookup, you might be happier disabling cover art retrieval in auto-import (Options > Library & Folders) and instead running the manual tool since it allows you to graphically approve every change.

Matt, this tool is lacking a key capability. It allows graphic selection of found images, and of current (if any) vs. found. That helps in some situations. But there's one more change that should be offered: NO IMAGE, which is necessary if bad images have already been added to tracks and nothing correct is found.

As listed in another thread, I'd also wish for the ability, while viewing the manual "Get from Internet" options, to be able to also paste in an image.

These options would handle almost all cover art updating needs:
1. Keep Current Image
2. Change to another image in the list generated by MC's "Get from Internet" action
3. Delete Current Image (so track has no image association)
4. Paste an image from the Clipboard (allows user to jump to another window, get an image from somewhere online or in MC's image folder -- even better would be ability to browse\preview files at this point.

[dcwebman]

These options would handle almost all cover art updating needs:

Plus a way to temporarily specify the artist/album name for those times when the EXACT album name isn't found, e.g. "(Explicit)" added.

[JimH]

NO IMAGE, which is necessary if bad images have already been added to tracks and nothing correct is found.

A bad image may just be a folder.jpg file in the same folder with a lot of files, as Matt said above.

As listed in another thread, I'd also wish for the ability, while viewing the manual "Get from Internet" options, to be able to also paste in an image.

These options would handle almost all cover art updating needs:
1. Keep Current Image

That's the default unless you choose an image.

2. Change to another image in the list generated by MC's "Get from Internet" action

I'm not sure I follow you, but if you mean that you want to select any image from the covers shown for a single album, you can do that.  Just select it and say OK.

3. Delete Current Image (so track has no image association)

You can replace it.  You can also remove the image.  In the tag window, right click on the image and choose remove.

4. Paste an image from the Clipboard (allows user to jump to another window, get an image from somewhere online or in MC's image folder -- even better would be ability to browse\preview files at this point.

You can paste now.  Same method as #3.

[Mr ChriZ]

A bad image may just be a folder.jpg file in the same folder with a lot of files, as Matt said above.

I've found that sooner or later that folder.jpg get's submitted to YADB and starts a horrible circle which is difficult to get out of unless you turn automatic image retrieval off. 
I remove the image, I remove the folder.jpg's and all links to the image.  MC then download's the image again and applys it to the file.

The only way I've found to get round this if I can't find a suitable image is to paste a blank image into the files.  I've actually screenshot the empty image, cut it out and now paste it in so that MC thinks it has an image for these files.

Otherwise I find my albums end up with random guys or other completely unrelated images.

[MusicHawk]

JimH:

I wasn't asking questions, I was offering suggestions to improve how the cover art "Get from Internet" system works. As you say, right now it does my options 1 and 2. What I'm pointing out is that there are 2 (or maybe 3 per dcwebman) options that aren't available in this process. Yes, options 3 and 4 can be done, by making a note of which tracks need more work, exiting the cover lookup system, and doing whatever is necessary. The point of the suggestions is that the cover art system would be much more useful, handling the vast majority of situations, if it gained options 3 and 4 and dcwebman's option 5.

Re Folder.jpg, quite a trap to fall into, but not in my case. I'm simply reflecting that MC's cover art lookup database has more than a few incorrect images, and/or gets confused as to album title as dcwebman notes, and/or gets confused about artist name because there can be variations. These are the reasons to expand the cover art preview/selection dialog to allow for options 3, 4, 5, etc.

[JimH]

I'm simply reflecting that MC's cover art lookup database has more than a few incorrect images, and/or gets confused as to album title as dcwebman notes, and/or gets confused about artist name because there can be variations.

The cover art system takes that into account.  It monitors which covers are chosen and which are ignored, and applies a ranking accordingly. 

[dcwebman]

Please add #6 I forgot about. When a list of cover art is displayed to select from, I often have to scroll up and down to determine which one I want because the best looking ones may be #1 and #4 for example. If there was a way to drag images in the box so that they could be right next to each other, it would be a lot easier to determine which one to use.

[MusicHawk]

Another cover art management wish-list suggestion (unless I missed a feature in this ever-evolving toolkit):

In a view or tag dialog, allow editing of the field that contains the cover art image path+filename, and have MC automatically rename the file per the name change.

In other words, give the user the same ability to manually change cover art image files that already is available for media track files. One difference, it's probably not wise to  allow moving -- keep the cover art file where it is, but allow filename editing.

The main reason for this is that many -- MANY in my case -- cover art images have goofy/long/wrong file names.

For instance, the image name assigned during ripping often is ultimately wrong. When the image is found and added by MC during Ripping, the image gets the track/album's "temp" names. But often these get tweaked by fixing up the tags, and/or renamed per Rename/Move dialog settings to give consistent structure to a library. Yet the cover art retains the old, now wrong, name.

The same happens with images that are imported, scanned, pasted, whatever -- cover art images end up with filenames that are mysterious, misleading, incomplete, very long, or that have unhelpful names that make manual image browsing and management a big challenge.

I know one "challenge" is that for an album, all the tracks might share a single cover art image file. It would be wonderful if MC was intelligent about renaming ONE track (or a set of selected tracks) in an album. Instead of renaming the common image, MC could create a copy with the new name. This simple (for the user) way to split one album images into two or more would then open the door to giving different tracks of an album different images as desired.

MC's development wizards know how to allow tag/field editing that updates the physical media file. How about allowing this for cover art files too?

[hit_ny]

MC's development wizards know how to allow tag/field editing that updates the physical media file. How about allowing this for cover art files too?

You prolly know its possible to have an image slide show while playing an album.

So can you give some examples where it makes sense to have different images associated per track of an album ?

[MusicHawk]

examples where it makes sense to have different images associated per track of an album

Other users have also said they do (or want to do) this, so there might be a variety of situations.

Some of the places where I like to use more pictures than "one album = on cover":

Multiple versions of the album, with different art, would be nice to use it all on various tracks.

Album with multiple pictures -- perhaps an included booklet or photo collection -- can be nice to assign various pictures to various tracks for display variety.

Greatest hits or similar where there could be any number of desirable images, from the original albums, artist photos, etc.

Compilation albums where each track should have its own image.

Multi-CD albums, where each disc has its own cover. I always set the Album name to the complete set's name, then use the Disc field to identify each disc. So, they all have the same Album name, yet often have separate cover images.

Individual tracks not associated with an album.

PS: I don't care for the slide show feature because my priority is to display the track info -- that's usually what listeners want to know when an interesting song comes on. My playback MC is set to show the cover image, plus Track Info, plus the stereo spectrum display, and below all that a few rows of the current playlist to see what just played and what's coming up. (A when-I-find-time "project" is to remodel Track Info to show several more fields that in my library have important info for listeners.)

[hit_ny]

There is a hack to achieve what you want but not sure if its worth it.

Create your own custom Album field.

Give a diff name for the std [Album] field for each track and then you can assign a diff image per track. You could prolly set it via an expression which is a combo of your custom album field plus a counter so its named meaningfully & consecutively.

You said earlier that you already have a custom [Artist] field.

The problem comes when you use a portable as then there wont be a way to group by the std [Album] field.

There is another possiblity and its to do with [Album Artist]. I do have multi-cd albums and have been able to assign a seperate image with each CD provided the  [Album Artist] was different even tho the [Album] was the same.

Might this be easier than a custom album field ?

I expect there could be more trouble if you depend on either of those fields for folder naming or if they form the basis for expressions elsewhere.

A decison like this would need to be thought through carefully.

[MusicHawk]

Thanks for the suggestion. Of course, the hack is a last-resort which I'm hoping isn't necessary.

Because Album is a standard field recognized by various systems (and to some extent so is cover art), the best solution is to alter MC's behavior, how it uses the standard Album field to control the image assigned to ALL an album's tracks. That is the "problem", and there are several suggestions for how to get MC to loosen-up a tad.

It's interesting that several threads are debating the nature, merits and level of control of MC's automatic behaviors. In a perfect world, MC will do everything automatically, with default "standard" behavior, but also be totally configurable, with each automatic feature easy to control, tweak or disable.

For cover art flexibility, this control could be via a per-track check box, or a sequence of actions, that tells MC to either assign the same image to all tracks of an Album, or not. If this was combined with the suggested improvements in the Cover Art lookup/review system, it just might meet everyone's needs, providing easy automation but over-ridable at every step.

[dcwebman]

Please add #6 I forgot about. When a list of cover art is displayed to select from, I often have to scroll up and down to determine which one I want because the best looking ones may be #1 and #4 for example. If there was a way to drag images in the box so that they could be right next to each other, it would be a lot easier to determine which one to use.

I'll do a +1 on this for me. ;-) Had to do this again today and there were two choices that were the same size but since they were separated by other covers, I couldn't easily tell which one I wanted. If dragging isn't possible, how about checkboxes where you can select ones to compare like in many online stores?