GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 570155
banshee can't find my cover art
Last modified: 2009-06-06 02:36:20 UTC
I have a number of CD albums saved on my computer. Many of them are obscure and so I make sure that I keep a file called "cover.jpg" in each folder with an album. Banshee did very well at finding this file for most of my albums. Apparently, however, when an album contains more than one disc's worth of music, the cover.jpg finding mechanism breaks. I put all files, from both discs, into the same folder. But, I mark which ones are disc 1 and 2 in the metadata for those files. All of my files are ogg vorbis audio with the oga extension at 192 or 256kbps. Adding a manual cover art selection tool would make this bug a moot point. But, I thought you should be aware of it.
Banshee does not look for a cover art image in a folder if it contains more than Max(30, track.TrackCount + 8) tracks. That's because this lookup is only intended for when the music file is in a directory specific to its album. So I can see why it doesn't work in your situation. Maybe we could also look at the DiscCount of the tracks.
Now I understand why Banshee fails to show my 'cover.jpg' for one of my compilation albums. I have 1 directory for that album (having 2 discs) and it contains more than 30 songs (yes indeed apparently it is possible to squeeze a lot of songs on 1 CD). You could do two things : 1) somehow take into account the DiscCount. But beware the TrackCount differs per disc, so you should add up all the TrackCounts and add 8 (where this number comes from is unclear to me) in stead of just TrackCount + 8 2) Remove the limit alltogether. This is the typical kind of restrictions that is unclear to an end-user. Just apply the logic : use the cover.jpg located in the same directory as the songs and that's it. Mr Buscemi (named after our famous Belgian artist), you could use a workaround (actually I'm applying it without knowing ...). Use 1 directory per disc and name it 'AlbumName (disc X)'. In your metadata (Vorbis comments in your case) only use 'AlbumName' as name of the album so that it appers only once in your collection and voilà : it will show your album art. The funny thing however is that this works because of (probably) another bug. I have checked 'Update file and folder names' in my Preferences. So it should rename the directories according to the tags (also Vorbis comments since I'm having a flac only library). But it does not remane 'Albumname (disc X)' to 'AlbumName'
I agree with Strider. If the directory has a file named "cover.jpg", there should be no reason why this file isn't used. This also solved a conundrum for me concerning a CD I have, which is only on one disc, but contains 32 tracks. I can see two possibilities: 1) Make the reasoning explict. Put it in the preferences. It could read something like "Banshee will find cover art only for directories with a maximum of [textbox] files." Then let people update the textbox. I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to parse "Max(30, TrackCount+8)". Is that a maximum of 30 or the number of tracks in the album plus eight? Which is supposed to take precedence? 2) Just remove this restriction completely. Honestly, I can't imagine why Banshee was built this way. Anyway, as I said before, allowing users to drag and drop artwork, or even some kind of manual selection from the menu, would remove this problem completely anyway and give Banshee the functionality of Muine and Rhythmbox, two programs which don't have the aesthetic appeal of Banshee.
The limit is here for the case when you have a folder with a bunch of random unrelated tracks (lots of singles, etc.). It would be a waste to look for cover art in that folder, and if you happen to have a "cover.jpg" in that folder, it would be used for all tracks in it. The 8 is arbitrary, the point is to set the limit at "the number of track in the album plus a reasonable number of other files". Matthew, banshee should pick up the "cover.jpg" for your album with 32 tracks, if the "Track Count" is set to 32 (you should see for example "1 of 32" the track properties). If TrackCount=12, Max(30, TrackCount+8)=30 If TrackCount=32, Max(30, TrackCount+8)=40 The bug about manually setting cover art is bug #336350. Adding all the TrackCounts would imply looking at all tracks in the folder. Maybe we could use this formula : DiscCount * Max(30, TrackCount+8)
Bertrand, thanks for the explanation. Here are my remarks : 1) people who stick a bunch of unrelated tracks into a directory, should make use of album art inside the track file itself. I do see the use of 'cover.jpg' in such a directory. People who, on the other hand, gather all the tracks related to one compilation album (whether that compilation would contain 1,2 or 10 discs, think about classical composer compilations for example) in the same directory are much more common. 2) If you really want to apply a forumla, the one you stated is insufficient : what TrackCount are you going the use : the one from disc 1, 2 or .. 10 ? Suppose the TrackCount on the last CD is much lower than on the other one and you take this as TrackCount ? My bottom line is simple : Since a) the use case is clear b) the reason for the current implemented limit is a pretty rare case in my opinion c) trying to set the limit right is complex and does not help the maintainability of the Banshee code ... Remove the limit and enjoy to live without limits :-) (Oops ... but you get my point, don't you ?)
Created attachment 128868 [details] [review] Patch that removes that limit on searching the album art in a track's directory Bertrand (& others) This patch removes the limit which kept the album art of showing on compilation albums with a lot of tracks. I tested it myself on two compilation albums and it worked as expected. Please consider for submission of 1.4.3 (if still possible)
Hello, I wanted to contribute my two cents to this bug. There are many albums that are in fact over 30 tracks. For example, the Norton Anthology of Music Collection often has more than 80 tracks on a single CD, and that's the condensed version. If I retag every huge album with a total track mark (many of my albums, while well tagged through Musicbrainz, don't have a total tracks tag), this will fix it (from what I can read of the statement "Max(30, totaltracks+8)"). However, I have more than one album like this, and over 800 tracks to tag in this manner. I have worked very hard to tag my albums as best I can, and am a little annoyed to find that using Banshee will require me to do yet another tag that I've forgotten about just to view some art. I can't deny that it's a little inconvenient. It's still marked unconfirmed, and there's been no comment. But if you have no particularly special reason for wanting to limit the non-total-track-tagged albums to 30 tracks, it would be awesome if the limit was removed and the patch added. In the meantime, I guess I'll go tagging...again...
As an aside, changing the Total Tracks tag metadata using MusicBrainz seems to have no effect. Banshee apparently doesn't re-read tag info all that often. I don't want to reimport the files. Guess I'll just have to retag them inside Banshee.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug is actually a feature, as reported in bug 523567. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 523567 ***