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[sixtiesstereo]

  Since I still use MC 10 for the reasons here http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=71991.0 ,
is there any way to have 10 be able to add and play my albUm folders with flac's rather then MP3's? 

[MrC]

Time to upgrade.  The FLAC input plugin was not made available by scthom until MC11:

   http://accessories.jriver.com/mediacenter/accessories.php

Folks can help you out with the slideshow.  It's not very complicated.  Basically its a quick modification to a view, and setting auto-import to pickup cover art.

The JRiver folks will appreciate the business too. :-)

[sixtiesstereo]

Time to upgrade.  The FLAC input plugin was not made available by scthom until MC11:

   http://accessories.jriver.com/mediacenter/accessories.php

Folks can help you out with the slideshow.  It's not very complicated.  Basically its a quick modification to a view, and setting auto-import to pickup cover art.

The JRiver folks will appreciate the business too. :-)

  Thanks for the reply and the info.  Where can I find the "quick modification" and the setting for auto pickup?  I've done a forum search several times for "slideshow" and this doesn't really show up.

[MrC]

A quick reply, as I'm having some trouble seeing clearly now after my eyes were dilated for my annual eye exam.

Your audio views by default only include audio files ([Media Type] = Audio).  Thus, you don't "play" the album art files directly; rather, the cover art and thumbnail you see in views, Display Mode, etc. when you play an album comes from how MC handles a single cover art file.  It references the cover art file, and can show it, and there is no need to configure MC specially to import cover art files.

To see additional artwork, you configure MC to import the artwork files.  This is done in Tools > Import... > Configure Auto-Import....  You add the path to your cover art if it is not already included in the list of paths, or edit the existing path's configuration to also include Image files.  When you OK your way out, MC will run auto-import and the new image files will be imported into the database.

To see these files so that you can play them along with audio, you'll create a custom view.  To make this easiest for you, can you describe how your audio files are organized?  For example, mine are ...\Artist\Album and all the audio and image files reside within these folders.  And where is your artwork located?

[sixtiesstereo]

A quick reply, as I'm having some trouble seeing clearly now after my eyes were dilated for my annual eye exam.

Your audio views by default only include audio files ([Media Type] = Audio).  Thus, you don't "play" the album art files directly; rather, the cover art and thumbnail you see in views, Display Mode, etc. when you play an album comes from how MC handles a single cover art file.  It references the cover art file, and can show it, and there is no need to configure MC specially to import cover art files.

To see additional artwork, you configure MC to import the artwork files.  This is done in Tools > Import... > Configure Auto-Import....  You add the path to your cover art if it is not already included in the list of paths, or edit the existing path's configuration to also include Image files.  When you OK your way out, MC will run auto-import and the new image files will be imported into the database.

To see these files so that you can play them along with audio, you'll create a custom view.  To make this easiest for you, can you describe how your audio files are organized?  For example, mine are ...\Artist\Album and all the audio and image files reside within these folders.  And where is your artwork located?

  Good Lord, this is the first time I've found a detailed expalantion of this situation on this forum.  Thank you for the
detailed reply!
   I have my folders set up the same as yours (artist/album/tracks) and all of my artwork is in each ALBUMS folder.
So in addition to folder.jpg, I have numerous scans of liner notes, tray scans, artist pics, etc in each folder.
  As far as where my artwork is located, it's as described above unless MC copies all of these files to a specific MC Documents and Settings folder which, to me, would be rather redundent and a waste of space.  But so be it if that's what it does.
  So, looking forward to how to set up a correct custom view,  TIA!

[Alex B]

Some old replies (by me) that might help:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=32482.msg223410#msg223410
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=50160.msg343248#msg343248
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=33953.msg231763#msg231763
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=22841.msg159422#msg159422

You can find the above and many other, possibly useful, "art" links here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=59513.msg449291#msg449291

[MrC]

To get you going, the custom view you'll create will use the folders as the basis for Album and Artist.  This is so that you don't have to immediately tag your cover art (I believe the views mentioned in AlexB's great posts will require this, but I haven't read them all, yet, too many for today!)

1. Right-click Audio, and Add Library View...
2. Select Empty View and name it something like: Artists, Albums, w/Cover art
3. Leave View As as Panes
4. Under Settings > Included files, deselect Use parent scheme rules for file display
5. Under Settings > Included files, select Set rules for file display... and press the Import/Export button and paste:

   [Media Type]=[Audio],[Image] [Filename (path)]=[M:\Music\" ~sort=[Dimensions]-d,[Track #]

but change the part in red to the path to your own music folder (mine audio is under M:\Music\)

6. Under Show categories in this order, select Add and add select Expression.  Set the Name to Artist, and add the expression:

    FileFolder(,1)

7.  Add another expression category, same as (6), but this time name it Album, and set the expression to:

  FileFolder(,0)

At this point, your view will now have two pane columns, one for Artist and one for Albums.  The file list below will be grouped by Album by default.  You can leave this if you want, and just double click an entry under the Artist or Album column in the pane.  This will start playback of the files in the list.  Since the artwork is sorted first (because we're sorting by Dimensions which Images have, but Audio does not), the artwork is queued (to the default Images zone) and then the remaining audio tracks (sorted in track order) are now queued to the current zone.

Now, if you tag your cover art images with the same tags you use for the audio (e.g. Album, Artist, Album Artist, Date), then you'll be able to use views based off the metadata rather than the folder structure as we've done here.  You can customize any view to include these images, and exclude cover art from your Images views (by ensuring Filename (path) does not start with the path to your audio (similar to, but the inverse of, what was done above).

Also, you can use the same expression we've used above in the views for album and artist to help quickly tag your cover art.  You can select one or more cover art images (easiest if you sort the file list by file type), and enter the corresponding expression above, appending an = character, into the Artist or Album tag.  You can edit directly in the file list column, or use Action Window > Tag.  For example:

In the Artist tag, enter:

  =FileFolder(,1)

In the Album tag, enter:

  =FileFolder(,0)

[sixtiesstereo]

 MrC
     Thanks for all of the info. I'll be attempting all of this in the next day or two.
I realize now why I was never able to get this to work after MC10.  It seems way more involved than
it really needs to be.  I've been using Media Monkey for several years, and nothing like this is really
required.  In MM you just start playing a track, open the album art window, and just scroll through the
assorted jpg's.  The problem with MM is it doesn't really have an automatic slideshow, strictly manual.
Plus, I have always really liked the other features in MC, especially the zoom feature during the slideshow,
so it's definitely worth trying to get it up and running.  I downloaded and installed MC 17, so I'll try all of this on that.
If it works, I'll upgrade.  Thanks again.......

[sixtiesstereo]

  I was finally able to get this to work per the info given, however, even though I was able to get the
slideshow function to work, the album cover view is not displaying as specified.  While some are shown correctly, others (most) are grouped in the bottom half by date (?) or other naming conventions other than artist/album title.
  I tried many other things to correct this, with no luck.  Also, rather than using folder.jpg as the cover thumbnail, other jpg's in the stack are showing as the main cover (the tray scan, etc, rather than folder .jpg).  Makes it hard to
locate the album desired when images other than the cover are being used.
  This is taking way too much time to get up and running when it really should be a selectable, preconfigred option that doesn't need to be set up using expressions etc.  I realize many users have alot of time on their hands but many
of us don't.
  I'll keep occasionally toying around with this, but I guess I'm back to Media Monkey, which worked the way I wanted
right after it was originally installed, and has ever since, with no additional programming needed.  Thanks again!

[Scolex]

sixties

Your choice but you shouldn't give up so easily there is a plethora of knowledge here and your desired result can be reached.
There are so many features in MC that place it at the top of the list for quality that it is more than worth putting in the time to learn it.
If all of your main covers are named folder.jpg and in their respective folder it should use them by simply setting
tools-->options-->file location-->cover art-->Audio Mode: to "In the same folder as the file (as Folder.jpg)"

[sixtiesstereo]

sixties


If all of your main covers are named folder.jpg and in their respective folder it should use them by simply setting
tools-->options-->file location-->cover art-->Audio Mode: to "In the same folder as the file (as Folder.jpg)"

  It's already set that way.  Doesn't work correctly in the album view we have been discussing in this thread (to
enable a slideshow view during playback).  When you hover over the album thumbnail, it cyles through all of the
jpg thumbnails associated with that album, but when you move the mouse off of the album, it shows a random jpg
from the directory rather than folder.jpg.

[Scolex]

What happens if you press f5 (refresh)? (just as a trouble shooting process to see if it is a screen refresh issue)
I would say this is a bug as it should return to the default cover on mouse-leave.

[sixtiesstereo]

What happens if you press f5 (refresh)? (just as a trouble shooting process to see if it is a screen refresh issue)
I would say this is a bug as it should return to the default cover on mouse-leave.

  Nothing happens.  Everything still the same.

[Alex B]

Technically the thumbnail display behavior is not a bug. It shows the thumbnails from the individual files that belong to the group. Since the view is not anymore a plain audio view (it contains audio and image files), MC shows the audio cover art image and the thumbnails of the included image files. Currently MC has no way to know which image should have a preference when this kind of view is set to display "fanned thumbnails".

As you explained, a built-in automatic visualization feature for this functionality would be nice to have. This has been discussed before and Matt from JRiver liked the idea, though he didn't actually promise to implement it.

[sixtiesstereo]

  Can the "fanned thumbnails" be disabled?  Just out of curiosity I added an additional expression "image - is - folder"
which then showed only the folder.jpg's as cover art for each album, but then there was no longer a slideshow when
playing the album, so I removed the additional expression.
  Aren't thumbnails and the actual full size jpg's two different things.  Why would thumbnails affect whether or not
the slideshow function runs (it's not using thumbnails, only full size scans in each folder)?  Also, if I rerun the image import, but this time tell it not to build  thumbnails, would that make a difference?  Or tell it somehow only to build thumbnails of folder.jpg and nothing else.  I never had this problem back with MC 10, so it seems odd that it was changed.

[MrC]

You can disable the fanning, but not the cycling on mouse-over.  The category image will be a rotation of the artwork within the category.

Your expression filtered the files to only present one file, hence the slideshow becomes a slideshow of one file.

Yes, the thumbnail cache is separate from the images themselves.

Things have changed since MC10.

[Alex B]

The thumbnails are just cached copies of the original images. They are used in library views. The option to not build them means only pre-building. If they do not already exist MC builds them when the library views are browsed.

Here is a quote from one of my replies:

The thumbnail cache contains small and fast copies of the cover art images (and images in general). The thumbnail views would not work at a useful speed if MC would need to read each and every image directly from the original source file when the views are browsed. All decent dedicated photo viewers use a similar technique.