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[MusicHawk]

I know this has been requested and discussed before, and I know that in some cases Quick Find will reattach "lost" images. But only in some cases, when the image name exactly matches what MC is looking for. When that fails, there seems to be no other option except to lose the images.

My situation is with a library of 60-thousand tracks. Many of the tracks have existing images, carefully selected to be shown during playback. But only some tracks comply with MC's built-in cover art matching scheme -- not very many, actually.

Very few tracks can be matched to album images, because very few tracks are from named albums. So, even though the library currently knows the exact name of each track's "cover art" image, if the cover art folder is moved there seems to be no practical way to reacquire the images automatically.

I really need to relocate the cover art folder due to its size (all cover art is in a single location). It will be a huge pain to lose all of this work just because of this.

I could handle this very simply if Find and Replace allowed access to the Image File field to change the cover art folder path in the database. Or if, upon seeing a change in Options > File Location > Cover Art, MC would automatically update Image File in all the records in the library.

Lacking either of these solutions, there seems to be no way to reliably relocate the cover art folder and not lose anything (or in my case, almost everything).

Given all the other power tools in MC -- many, many ways to do good (or evil) to the library -- why not also allow manipulation of the Image File field so this precious resource (and cool feature of MC) is also under user control?

[shawnthewoman]

See my reply to this post: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=58501.0.  Slightly different scenario, but principles of the fix are the same, assuming, of course, that no changes are being made to the file-names of the files themselves.  I think this will work for you. But I agree with you.  I see no practical purpose of blocking edits of the "Image File" field.

As is always good practice, try this with a few "test" files first!

[MusicHawk]

I appreciate the suggestion. But as I explained, "Cover Art-Quick Find in Cover Art Directory" doesn't help (I tried it). With my library it fails much of the time because it uses a built-in expression to match the cover art file name to certain tag values, essentially assuming songs are in albums and cover art is named per albums.

But in my library, very few of my music files/tags have values needed for the built-in expression to work. Even if I could edit the expression, it wouldn't help because there's no particular pattern to my cover art file names. My library is not album oriented, it's mostly a giant catalog of SINGLE HIT recordings I collected from programming radio stations. Much of the cover art has whatever name it originally had. Other cover art might have started with an artist/album-related name, but often the tag was later edited so they no longer match.

But this situation seems to be anticipated by JR, since MC allows arbitrary image files to be assigned to music records. So MC should not assume that cover art file names consistently match the internal cover art lookup expression.

Therefore, I'm requesting that MC allow the Image File field to be edited and especially to be processed by Find+Replace.

[Alex B]

So, even though the library currently knows the exact name of each track's "cover art" image, if the cover art folder is moved there seems to be no practical way to reacquire the images automatically.

You can do that by exporting a file list as an MPL playlist and using some other program for editing the Image File values in the mpl file. For instance MS Word has a good find & replace tool.

After you have edited the MPL file you can update file data by using the import playlist feature in the File menu.

However, I agree with you, it would nice to be able to do that inside MC. I have requested the same a few times.

[MusicHawk]

I used the method of exporting, editing, then importing the MPL/XML file. In my case it was a really painful process (took hours) because this library generated a 100MB file, not at all what text editors like (I had to try several to find one that would handle it at all). And this method is far beyond and/or very risky for the average user who might want or need to relocate the cover art folder.

I sure wish MC would remove the restriction on the Image File field, or if it is essential to be locked, explain why.