Bug report - album art not being supplied correctly?

[flvinny521]

I have a portion of my library that does not have any album art. I have set up MusicCabinet to prefer last.fm artwork anyway, and those files seem to correctly display artwork in the web interface. However, in DSub, the album art is not present. Thinking it was a DSub error, I posted a question to daneren2005, and his response was:

The album art comes from the server. I have no control over what is sent. Talk to hakko about what is supplied by http://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp#getCoverArt

Do you have any insight?

[hakko]

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=11143

[flvinny521]

Thank you hakko, you're a gentleman and a scholar.

I swear I have spent hours scouring this forum over the past few days, I don't know how I missed that thread.

[hakko]

I just had a vague idea it existed, I find the Advanced search feature of the forum useful as you can limit your searchs to the MusicCabinet sub forum only and search for "album artwork" etc.

[daneren2005]

I might be over simplifying the issue, but would it not be fairly simply to just download the album art to a tmp file on the server, then send that album art using the same method (ie: rescaling it) that it currently uses?

If that is too difficult, I believe when no album art exists a error message is replied. Maybe a good work around would be to embed that remote url into the error message. That way the existing clients which choose not to be MusicCabinet aware can continue in blissful ignorance, while those that chose to use that parameter can.

[hakko]

There could definitely be an button called "Download last.fm cover image for albums lacking both embedded artwork and folder artwork", which identified those albums and downloaded the last.fm image, calling it folder.jpg.

For me personally, the benefit of displaying last.fm artwork is mainly to save bandwidth (for people on bad connections). I kind of assume that people already have well tagged libraries, which to me at least includes artwork. The last.fm images are not high-res, they could be wrong where multiple versions of the same album are released etc. They aren't totally reliable, I think that using beets or similar software is a better approach for getting good artwork.

But I guess it would be convenient for people who don't want to spend their time hunting for perfect artwork. (I'm not judging anyone, this is just the reason I haven't built it)

[flvinny521]

I'm probably in the minority; I do obsess over my music tags, but I have purposely removed album art from all tags in my library up to this point. I'm sure most people who keep an organized filing/tagging system have the album art already. I plan on changing my tagging system to include the artwork, so it won't be an issue for me much longer.