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Author Topic: Cover Art & Multiple Artist  (Read 2200 times)

Facel

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Cover Art & Multiple Artist
« on: July 15, 2010, 07:58:09 am »

hello everybody

Sorry for posting a question that has probably already been answered but I have not been able to achieve my goal despite some long reading seession on this forum   ?

Concerning album with mutiple artists (let say "Golden sixties" for example), I would like to have
    - an album covert art for the album only (shown in the album view)
    - individual artist cover art for each song of the album (shown when I play a song of this album)

Following the different post on this forum I have done 'click right -> cover art -> add from file     on each individual song.

The problem is for the 1st song of the album
: either I have the right artist cover => but in this case the Album cover has became the Artist cover
                                             either I have the right Album cover => but in this case the artist cover is replaced by the album cover.

Could you tell me how to proceed to have the correct
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Facel

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Re: Cover Art & Multiple Artist
« Reply #1 on: July 15, 2010, 08:02:33 am »

Sorry for this "email interuption"

Could you tell me how to proceed to have the correct voer Art for the album and for the 1st song ?


by the way, is there a solution for getting automaticly cover art for a disc with multiple artists ans songs (like : 25 oldies best) ?

knowing that this kind of record has many many versions : Oldies Best N°1, Oldies best N°2, ....
thanks
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Alex B

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Re: Cover Art & Multiple Artist
« Reply #2 on: July 15, 2010, 08:39:29 am »

MC uses only track cover art. The album thumbnail in views is one of the track thumbnails.

You can manually link a different cover art image to each track, but you can't define a separate album cover art image. MC will display one of the cached track thumbnails as an album image. (I can't say which one without testing. The choice may be arbitrary or it may use some logic.)

Quote
by the way, is there a solution for getting automaticly cover art for a disc with multiple artists ans songs (like : 25 oldies best) ?

knowing that this kind of record has many many versions : Oldies Best N°1, Oldies best N°2, ....

If someone has the same [Album Artist (auto)] and [Album] tags as you and this person has submitted the correct cover art image to the online DB then your MC instance can find it automatically. You may find that it is better to handle this kind of special cases manually.
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MusicHawk

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Re: Cover Art & Multiple Artist
« Reply #3 on: July 15, 2010, 01:11:27 pm »

One more tip regarding cover art in multiple/various artists albums:

If all tracks should display the same image -- perhaps the album cover, just locate it and add to all the tracks. However, if the desired is to provide a unique image for each track -- such as a picture of the artist, or the track's original album -- this requires "fooling" MC.

If you add cover art to, say, track 1, by artist 1, via copy+paste (find the image online, paste it into MC), that creates a new image file. MC automatically names it per the built-in expression that uses [Album Artist (auto)] and [Album].

Therefore, if you do the same to, say track 2, by artist 2, of the same album, it might be given the same filename. This depends on what MC puts into Album Artist [auto] for the track. Various actions will override this value, but unless you do, you'll have two tracks by different artists but with the same [Album Artist (auto)] and [Album]. If MC gives track 2's cover art the same filename it already gave to track 1, both tracks will display the same image -- and the originally image you pasted into track 1 is gone from your computer because its file was overwritten.

The workaround is to trick MC: Before pasting an image into a track, temporarily rename the track's album -- I just stick the track number character in the front. Then paste the image. MC will give the image a filename based on the Album name of moment. Do this for the next track, and it will also get a unique name. Then when all the images are set, change the Album of all tracks back to the correct name.

(I suggest using the track number as the temporary extra character added to the Album name to avoid a trap I fell into once upon a time. I was just sticking an X in front, but of course, when I did that to every track, they again had the same Album name. So I needed to be less lazy and make each track's Album name unique.)

To handle this as less of a hack, MC could be evolved to allow specifying of the cover art file naming expression. Track number or similar could be added to automatically do what I do. BUT.... If this was the library-wide expression, ALL album tracks would be unique, so an album with 14 tracks would result in the same image 14 times -- wasting storage space. There are various ways an expression could try to deal with this, but I see a loophole no matter what.

Another MC option could be to pop up a confirmation dialog that displays the proposed image filename, allowing a quick edit to make it unique.

And there are other ideas -- lots of discussion of this over the years. (Please, if I got any of this wrong ... running to a meeting ... please correct.)
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Managing my media with JRiver since Media Jukebox 8 (maybe earlier), currently use Media Center for Audio/Music and Photos/Videos.
My career in media spans Radio, TV, Print, Photography, Music, Film, Online, Live, Advertising, as producer, director, writer, performer, editor, engineer, executive, owner. An exhausting but amazing ride.

Clawdeath

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Re: Cover Art & Multiple Artist
« Reply #4 on: July 15, 2010, 11:59:29 pm »

The feature you're asking for is the exactly same feature I've been asking for ages, and can be resumed as "the ability to represent a category field with a custom image", in your case you want to use a cover art for the album, and a different one for each song, in case of multiple artist album, in my case I had over 2500 albums from over 700 artists, and I can't figure out which artist is selected just by looking at a random cover art from that artist, and I am forced to get close to the computer screen to read the artist name what makes my remote control pretty useless, same thing applies to my video library, I had lots tv series box and animes, and I can't identify which series or anime is selected just by looking at a random screenshot taken from one chapter inside that field, and i also would love to represent each series with its own logo, each season with its own dvd cover art and each chapter with their own screenshot, and to represent each band in my music library with the band's logo, so I can watch my videos without get my lazy @ss out of the couch and listen to my musics without stop whatever I'm doing to get close to computer screen to read the band's name, and then my remote control can become really useful, instead of this useless brick that it is right now.

When I've asked this for the first time Rick.ca gave a workaround, but it actually doesn't work, the workaround consists in create a .log file, import it in to Media center tag it as a music file, then tag it under the artist you want then under the album you want, select a cover art for it, put the mouse over the album that your .log file is in and wait to the images roll, and when it shows the image you want just take your mouse out of it, but surely I don't had the time to put the mouse over 700+ artists 27 series 74 animes and 171 seasons to wait the images roll and stop in the one i want, plus every time you accidentally pass the mouse over a field to reach another one that its close to it, it will roll the images again and you need to redo this thing again, and when I close Media center and re open it, lots of cover arts (30 % or more) get reshuffled, it would be awesome to use your own custom image to represent a field instead of roll through the cover arts inside it, but actually you can't, and this have been asked for ages, and unfortunately probably you will hear a "the program can't do this, use a workaround that take ages to be done, doesn't work, and don't do what you want, or piss off" kind of response when you ask for this feature to be added on JRiver Media Center.
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