Album Art from Embedded Tag?

[ricardoruiz]

Sindre (or anyone familiar with this),

I'm trying to understand how Subsonic deals with album art. My library does not have images in the folders, it only has embedded album art. Unfortunately, I have some directories which don't follow the normal Artist\Album\Music convention, but are a collection of songs from different artists. In this case, all files in that folder get assigned the same album art, even though each file has the correct artwork embedded in the file. It seems to me like Subsonic makes an assumption that all music files in a directory share the same album art.

Could you please validate my understanding of this. And if this is correct, any chance of fixing it so each file can have it's own album art even if in the same directory? If not, I might have to reorganize my library, but it would result in a massive number of folder subtrees with one single MP3 at the end.

Thanks!!

[BKKKPewsey]

You are correct in your assessment.
SS will use the jpg in the folder if available - if not it will use the 1st embedded album art it finds (usually from track 1)

[ricardoruiz]

That's unfortunate. Most of my music collection is organized by Genre/Artist/Album, but pretty much every Genre has a Genre/Singles directory with all the one-offs that don't warrant a full Artist/Album tree. These account for hundreds (if not thousands) of files. Don't know if I want to go creating that many Artist/Album directory trees just so Subsonic will pick up the correct album art, especially when I've gone through the trouble of embedding the correct one already.

That said, I've been systematically trying cloud players and "home hosted" systems for weeks now. And they have all annoyed me to no end. Subsonic was the first one to do things the way I wanted except for two things:

1) This album art issue and...
2) Needs automated imported playlist refresh (which I believe existed in previous versions).

[hakko]

How would you want hundred or thousands of files in one directory to be displayed?

[ricardoruiz]

Hmm... well. As an example. Let's say I have a genre called '80s'. In that directory are a bunch of Artist/Album/Songs directory trees for the groups I have full records for. But I do have a directory called "Singles" which has about 100 songs from different groups for which I might have one or two songs each. Using MediaMonkey as my music manager makes things easy because my whole library is organized whichever way I want and I can generate playlists (by scripting) automatically based on ratings, genres, tempos, etc. I usually play my library using playlists, but I can always search for what I want if I so desire. But I digress...

The issue is that I can currently play my library whichever way I want using Windows Media Player, iTunes, DLNA servers, on portable devices, etc. and they *ALL* will show the album art for the song that is playing, regardless of it's location on my library. But for Subsonic, I would have to take those 100 songs and create (as an example) 100 new directory structures (Artist/Album/Song) with only one song in each, all so Subsonic can display the right album art... which was already embedded in the file to begin with and should have been employed correctly.

I would have been happy if the Subsonic players (web, external or phone app) would have displayed the image embedded in the file, but Subsonic seems to be overriding it with the incorrect one from the database. Seems to me like Subsonic already assigns an image per song anyway, so it should be possible to have a settings option which forces these images to be loaded on a per-file basis. That way, both types of users could be served!

[hakko]

Since Subsonic is open source, it can be changed. Check out the Mods section of the forum. The mod that I'm working on (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9504) doesn't care about directories for organizing (even though you can browse by directory), so it would categorize your 100 songs as separate albums by separate artists, and have all those artists displayed in the left frame. Maybe not what you want either? Each distinct album gets it's own unique artwork, no matter if many albums appear in the same directory, taken from embedded artwork. But then, I'm sure this mod has other drawbacks that you don't like. So, the best way to get the music player that fits your own needs perfectly is to start modding/creating your own! There are so many ways to organize ones collection so it very hard to create a generic music player that fits everyone.

[ricardoruiz]

Well... just so happens I'm a software developer, unfortunately don't do much Java. I'm more of a C++/C# Windows developer...

That said, I looked over the code and I can see where only 'Folders' (called ALBUMs) are given a "Cover Art Path", while actual media files do not get one. But upon retrieval of cover art, if a media file happens to have one, it will return that. So, within my incredibly limited view of the codebase, seems like I might get what I want by simply adding cached cover art paths to all media files.

Sooo... now, if I can figure out how to build this thing...

[hakko]

check out all code, install maven and java 6 (jdk, not jre), go to the subsonic-main directory, run "mvn package", and it'll give you a new subsonic.war in subsonic-main/target if you've been a good developer. you can take it, replace your current subsonic.war, restart your subsonic service and be good to go.

[ricardoruiz]

Thanks for the info... will try it when I get some time.