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[4BYE]

Hello, I finally switched to MC17 mainly because I now can play ripped DVD files to my phone and more important my laptop the way it should.
However I was really afraid bumping into new "problems" which cost my a lot of time to figure out. Because I bought a great new Asus laptop I decided to make a start with MC17. The first major problem for me is that I don't know how to handle my cover art anymore.
I made backups of my Cover Art folder and MC16 backups so I'm fine there. My main PC will be having MC17 with my main library.

I have about 6000 CD's, 1500 comic books, almost 2800 physical DVD's and 3000 video files in my library. (The reason is that I once owned a videorental store and a CD store).

All cover art files are included in the specific folders as "folder.jpg". Except for the physical DVD's ofcourse. I added an image for those manually and saved those to the Cover Art folder. Also for the video files and ripped DVD files I did a "save to cover art folder..." just in case. I made a special "Audio Cover Art" folder where I saved my audio album cover art files.

BUT...

I was thinking working the same way with MC17 but when I saved some new video files I noticed my cover art was not placed in the Cover Art folder anymore although I made changes to save them to: D:\Media Center 17\Cover Art. I also noticed that jpg files were added to my specific folder for those new videofiles. In this case several episodes of a TV Serie. I still would prefer having my original "folder.jpg" for each movie, and have all of them in my Cover Art folder for backup reasons named after the file like it used to in MC16. From what I read this isn't possible anymore. (except for audio files if I'm not wrong?)
At this point I do see some cover art in my physical DVD section but a lot of them are gone. I also don't know where the onse are stored that are still visable because they are not in my Cover Art folder. My Cover Art folder was empty but I copied the one from MC16 to it hoping it would do me any good. I read a lot of topics about dealing with the new Cover Art handling but still I don't know how to set up my system for it.
The more topics I read the more confusing it gets. It took me sooooo much time to make all those folder.jpg so I don't want to loose them. Maybe it's important that I need to tell that I first installed MC17, upgraded and then uninstalled MC16. I made a new folder "D:\Media Center 17" where I have my library backups and cover art folder. I renamed my "Media Center 16" folder to "Media Center 16 OLD" so I was sure MC17 wouldn't  use my old MC16 folders.

I hope someone can point me in the right direction to build up my MC17 system again...

Regards,


Theo

[Matt]

Is there something that is not working?  After an upgrade, all art should continue to work. 

The program uses slightly different naming in the cover art folder for new art.  That is documented here:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Cover_Art

[4BYE]

Hello Matt,

Thanks for your reply so soon. I was experimenting and found out I still have to keep my Cover Art folder in "D:\Media Center 16\Cover Art".
I restored my library and first copied the Cover Art folder back to "D:\Media Center 16\Cover Art". This way at least I have everything showing again.
The next step for me would be how to get them to "D:\Media Center 17\Cover Art" I guess.

I would prefer to have a folder.jpg in my VIDEO_TS folder that I copy to my Cover Art folder as a backup, the way I used to do it in MC16. I read that might not be possible anymore so what would be the best way to handle the new video files?

[4BYE]

I came to a topic that explained some more about the new covert art behaviour. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Old files still have the link to the covert art folder. (So that's why I got confused adding new ones that didn't show up)
But new files are only saved in the video files folder, keeping also the original "folder.jpg" I made. No new added cover art shows up again in the (in my case) D:\Media Center 17\Cover Art folder.

I managed to transport my cover art to D:\Media Center 17\Cover Art and did a cleanup as was suggested on a topic.
Unfortenately I still have 440 files left in the Cover Art folder. My comic book files are all in "Albums" except one, but I guess there's a double title in there somehow. With the video files I have about 90 short. (7664 video files - 7575 cover art files: 440 in Cover Art folder and 7135 in Videos folder)
Also there seems to be missing cover art images in D:\Media Center 17 (all folders) that still are shown in MC17. Could there be still links to the MC16 folder? (In other words are not all copied to the MC17 folders?)

I also notice a lot of people aren't thrilled about this new way especially concerning back-ups of the cover art files. I have to agree with them because I spend a lot of time having perfect cover art files and I want to have a way of saving them in an easy way.

I will wait adding new files untill I exactly know what is the best way to handle my library. I don't want to have folders with both folder.jpg and moviename.jpg in it and have others in my Cover Art folder. This is too confusing. The other option would be copying all the cover art to the folders where the movies are in and then delete the folder.jpg files. But I cannot undo this when JRiver decides to make a change and/or turn it back the way it was.

 

[lise]

I read the wiki and I'm still confused.

My default folder is and always was C:\MC\CoverArt.
I can't change this because the cover art for all my data files is there, named automatically by MC as "Data - [name].jpg".


I just saved a cover art file for a new recipe, and it is being saved with the file, so "C:...Documents\Cooking\[name].jpg

So, question 1:  Why is it ignoring my default setting (to save in a specified folder)?


The issue with data is that I can't have the jpgs follow the file for two reasons:

1. all of my folders under Documents will now double in size to include the jpgs and this will slow down my system at one point. Sometimes I browse my documents with Windows Explorer instead of MC, and it will be too unwieldly to deal with all the jpgs among the files. I don't mind this system when it comes to video or movies because I always use MC to get to those anyways, but Documents folders is a different issue.

2. Some of my Documents folders actually include non-cover art jpgs. So when I import a data folder, I can only assume that all jpgs will be imported into my database (cover art and non-cover art). What a mess that will create.

And now for Audio.

When the cover art is missing (and many went missing, I don't know when or why), I can't use "Quick Find in File" anymore, because at some point MC stopped saving my audio cover art to my default location and automatically added an Albums subfolder to that default location.  The only way to use "Quick Find in File" is to change the default location to MyDefaultLocation\Albums. But of course, the minute I do that I lose all my data cover art.  

Cover art is the one thing in MC that takes the longest time to get right, especially for data. I can't tell you how many days in total I have spent ensuring that all my Cooking and Woodworking and Household documents all had the proper images. There is no automatic way to get data cover art, nor does data generate a sidecar file, so the only thing ensuring all those hours of work are preserved is to establish a system (default folder worked great) and ensure everything is always backed up.

Now that MC ignores what I have set as a default folder, I don't know what to do. I can no longer just backup the one folder. Seems I now have to keep backing up my entire computer instead. Not the same thing at all.

[lise]

Another issue to add to my post above:

Just discovered a major issue with saving document cover art in the folder with the document.

The jpg isn't moved along with the file when the file is moved via Rename/Move.
And when the file is returned to the same folder as the jpg, the two are not connected even though they share the same file name. I tried to rebuild the thumbnail to no avail.

[Matt]

Honestly we haven't thought a lot about cover art for data files.

I sort of think the same arguments for using sidecar video art apply to data files.  To avoid image filename collisions, we would either need to use filenames that aren't human readable in a central directory or use sidecar images.  Sidecar images seem the better choice to me.

The old naming scheme of "Data - [Name]" isn't very robust -- it'll have the same collision issues that plagued video files before we made the changes.

[rick.ca]

2. Some of my Documents folders actually include non-cover art jpgs. So when I import a data folder, I can only assume that all jpgs will be imported into my database (cover art and non-cover art). What a mess that will create.

You can use an import rule to tag the cover art images as cover art, and then exclude them from your normal views. You might even appreciate being able to use a maintenance view that includes them (or just temporarily include them) so you can see exactly what you've got instead of relying on thumbnails. Being beside the documents will make the association more secure, and they can be backed up along with the documents they're associated with (by whatever backup method you're using for your documents).