Single vs Album Cover Art

[SoniXnSubs]

If a file has an embeded cover art, I feel it would be more logical to present this instead of a picture file in the folder where the file resides.

There are actually many things to consider If you want to get techie. I would propose the following priority regime when finding the cover to present (turning this functionality on/off in settings somewhere would be fine too :

1. Many file formats have the posibility to embed more than one cover inside the file. Each cover art may be associated with a label or a type like “cover”, “front”, “other” and so on. Finding and prioritizing the right ones for each format is essencial.
2. If no embeded cover is present, use a picture file from the folder where the music file resides. A folder could contain many picture files, so one need to make a prioritized list of filenames like “cover.jpg”, “folder,jpg”. This is a setting in Subsonic already.

This makes it possible to show single cover art and album cover art as one desires. Considder the “Billboard Top 100” for 1989 for instance… a lot of single covers there yet just one album cover…

[Exrace]

I have noticed when the file is streamed to an external player the internal image is streamed as you would expect.

Possibly for performance reasons it doesn't do this in the web interface?
You could see the pref penalty this would have when browsing or creating thumbnails.

[SoniXnSubs]

I see the "penalty" argument, and this functionality should therefor be an option that you could turn on/off. On my 802.11n network this could hardly be an issue :- )