Vocalpoint - Just curious - why are you using customized cover art - why not the original cover for the album from which the track came?
Good Q:
This latest foray (custom stuff) is really my best solution to a problem that popped up after weeks of sorting. Follow me thru as I explain....
For the last 6-12 months - I have been devoting an extraordinary amount of time to tagging, cataloging and archiving (on three sets of drives) my entire digital lossless library. My plan is to have every track consolidated down to it's original album release, in it's original release form, mastering and so on. Whilst I was dealing with the major sorting - I came upon several binders full of data DVDs that I burned back in 2007-2008. On these discs were tons of single tracks (all in FLAC) with no real center or purpose - all scattered thru time with wide swings in metadata.
So - after going thru some 30-40 DVDs and copying out every file - I then went thru the entire folder of tracks and ditched out any dupes that were already represented in the main library. When I finished this massive sorting exercise - I found I had about 300-350 tracks with no home. Like I mentioned - deep album cuts, singles, remixes, weird crap from years ago.
So - what to do? Do I go "all in" and do my usual obsessive metadata session per cut - including album art...or do I set these up as rough "collections" having something in common with the other weirdness discovered. First off - I decided to go all in on metadata for each cut - they all have to be fully tagged to work with my playlists, smartlists, lookups etc but I did decided to compromise with the art. For 300-350 separate tracks - many that are very obscure - finding suitable album art is not always guaranteed or possible. Then there's the work involved prepping said art - when it can be found. I am a huge stickler for my album art and have been known to "obsess" a little over finer details. Doing 300 art sessions for 300 single tracks - probably not going to happen.
But once I got one custom collection going with a single custom art cover - it was great and easy to find in MC. Like you - I rely on views - and my most used is a view called Recent Albums - which really represents the last 60 days of imports to the main library. And nothing annoys me more than album "stragglers" in the library that have a single track or a couple of tracks - I decided to slip in a custom cover for all tracks and then it appears nicely as a single "album" in this view.
Once done - it's cool, it's easy to find and easy to play in a single session. Most importantly - it lets me get these obscurities back into rotation without worrying too much about all the minutiae that I usually devote to a full album tagging session.
However - if I happen to stumble onto a scanned 45 picture sleeve or something decent that can be used for art - I might slip one in here and there
but in general - I am jazzed about these custom covers. I wanted mine to look unique and have a feel like radio promo releases (I have a long history in music and in broadcast) so these comps "look" like something I may have had on my desk in 1987. Weird I know - but fun just the same.
Cheers!
VP