View Full Version : Album Thumbs Issue
i was testing out the id3v2 way to add an album cover to my songs. i have a bunch of singles in a directory and i wanted to get them to show their thumbnails, and obviously a folder.jpg file won't work. i added an album cover to one song's id3v2 tag and now it uses that thumbnail for all of the songs (at least the one's that don't have a cover added.) ???
anyone else having this issue?
oops, i have the 12-05 build version.
nope. and i just tested it. in a brand new folder, i copied an mp3 with an embedded cover image, and several other random mp3s without an embedded cover image. the image only showed on the correct file.
well, it is on mine.
to make sure i wasn't crazy i checked to see if there was a image file in the directory and there is not. it even gave the folder the album image. so, right now, all of my songs have "warrant - cherry pie" as the cover, except the songs that have albums in their id3v2. it's not a huge problem, since i'm working on getting album images, i just check around.
jmarshall
2005-12-16, 04:51
i'm wondering if this could happen under the following circumstances:
1. single file in the folder, with it's image tag. folder is read once, so this info is in the database. as it's the only album in the folder, the image will be assigned to the folder, right?
2. additional mp3's copied into the same folder without image tags. will these now be assigned the folder thumb?
the only way around the above scenario is to not assign an image to the folder unless it has a folder.jpg, or to test for a folder thumb on every insert into the database and remove it once 2 or more album names are in that folder. i believe this occurs on scan, but am not sure if this occurs on subsequent db insertions or not.
cheers,
jonathan
makes sense, though i didn't copy any files into the directory. it had it's 600 or so files in it the whole time. i added this image to the id3v2 tag, rescanned the folder, and then 90% of the files had that album cover as it's cover. really odd.
H2Deetoo
2005-12-16, 10:31
this was addressed before (by me) and i got a nice answer from kraq3d.
it seems that if a cover is found inside an mp3, then it is stored in xbmc's database (for fast caching) and will be identifed by the album tag in the mp3.
if this album tag is empty, then all mp3's with no album tag will get the save cover (thumb).
(all mp3's with the same album tag belong to the same album, thus the same thumb!)
so the trick is to uniquely identify each mp3 using its tags, specifically the album tag.
i have a habit of simply filling in the song's title in the album tag (if that song doesnt belong to a real album).
rgs h2deetoo,
oh, yes, if you've scanned, then the folder will get a cached thumb. and then all items in that folder without a thumb, will inherit that thumb.
if you do not scan, this does not happen.
oh ok, so you're saying that i may have added a album cover to the song, which probably didn't have an album title set. so, in turn, all of the songs in the folder with no album set grabbed this image. that completely makes sense. i'll check it out when i get home.
no... you only have an image on a single song. therefore, that folder will inherit that image. and then any other songs without an image in that folder will get that folder image.
i actually tested it. as soon as i gave that mp3 and album name, so it wasn't blank, the other non-set songs went back to the xbmc default image. so, since i put an album image on the song but didn't set the album name, xbmc assumed that all of the other songs without albums were from the same album. make sense?
that didnt seem right, but its has been such a long time, i had to go back and look at the code. this is correct behviour.
a while back, the operation was changed a bit. the image is cache dthe cover using both the directory path and the album name found in the metadata tags. this was done to prevent it from being inherited by songs from another album. this also allows folder.jpg to correctly be inherited by any other songs that may not have an embedded image.
in your case, you had no album tag, so the image was cached using the path alone. then since all the other songs in that same path also had no album name in their tags, they inherited that image.
i think i need to put together a short write up for the wiki on how thumbnails are inherited in music.
ok, here's the full detail... first, the tag reader runs and caches any embedded art using the folder path and the album name. (assuming, of course, that you have tag reading enabled.)
then the code which assigns thumbs to files runs and assigns thumbs in the following order:
1) cached album thumb (this is all the embedded album art read from by the tag reader and cached using the folder path and album name.)
2) cached filename.tbn.
3) remote filename.tbn (which is then cached) if "find remote thumbs is enabled"
4) cached folder.jpg (based off the folder path)
5) remote folder.jpg (which is then cached) if "find remote thumbs is enabled"
6) remote foldername.tbn (which is then cached) if "find remote thumbs is enabled"
running a scan automatically enables "tag reading" and "find remote thumbs" so everything can be cached. once a scan is run, all your files and their thumbs are stored in the database. what happens before all of this, is that when you enter a folder path, xbmc first checks the database. if the items are found in the database, all of this is skipped.