Cover Art for tracks not in an album [#18129]

[piphomer]

Hello all.

I have an issue whereby all tracks that are not part of an album are getting album art for a random album... Queen's Greatest Hits II !!!

https://pasteboard.co/q4acyK7jStZc.jpg

Tracks that are part of an album get their correct artwork, but tracks that are not all get the same image.

I found that if I copy the Artist value into the Album Artist field, it fixes the problem but it then creates an Unknown Album in my albums list for each artist, so this is no good at all.

Furthermore, I found the .thumbnails folder on my device. It doesn't matter whether I delete the folder, or delete all files in it - they just come back again:

https://pasteboard.co/O60Wv4xULEdl.jpg

Can anyone help me figure this out?

Thanks

Phil

[Lowlander]

Do you have Artwork lookup enabled in MMA? If so, you may want to disable it.

[rusty]

Hi,

I'm not totally clear on how you get the images to be assigned to tracks without Artwork (when i tested, tracks that were missing Artist, Album, or Album Artist and didn't have artwork, showed up without Artwork in MMA). But it's no doubt a case of https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=18129 (which is due to a limitation in MMA--artwork is designed to be applied 1 image per album).

We're going to look into this post 2.0.

-Rusty

[piphomer]

Do you have Artwork lookup enabled in MMA? If so, you may want to disable it.

No, I have that turned off.

[piphomer]

Hi,

I'm not totally clear on how you get the images to be assigned to tracks without Artwork (when i tested, tracks that were missing Artist, Album, or Album Artist and didn't have artwork, showed up without Artwork in MMA). But it's no doubt a case of https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=18129 (which is due to a limitation in MMA--artwork is designed to be applied 1 image per album).

We're going to look into this post 2.0.

-Rusty

Makes it sound like you think it's something I did myself? No all my non-album tracks have either no artwork in folder and tag, or have single artwork if I can find it.

I should also note this didn't happen on v1, has only occurred since the recent update to v2.

[Lowlander]

Note that MMA uses 1 Artwork per Album. If Album and Album Artist are blank, then all those files are seen as 1 Album and share the same Artwork. This is something that will be addressed in the future, but not in MMA 2.0.

[rusty]

Makes it sound like you think it's something I did myself? No all my non-album tracks have either no artwork in folder and tag, or have single artwork if I can find it.

Sorry that wasn't my intent--I just meant to communicate that I tried to replicate the problem but haven't been able to so far, so if you have any additional hints, they'd be appreciated

I should also note this didn't happen on v1, has only occurred since the recent update to v2.

If it turns out that this is a new bug introduced in 2.0, we'll raise the priority and try to tackle it right away. We'll continue to try to replicate...

-Rusty

[piphomer]

Note that MMA uses 1 Artwork per Album. If Album and Album Artist are blank, then all those files are seen as 1 Album and share the same Artwork. This is something that will be addressed in the future, but not in MMA 2.0.

Ugh I really hope this isn't the case - like I said, this wasn't an issue in MMA 1.0

[piphomer]

Sorry that wasn't my intent--I just meant to communicate that I tried to replicate the problem but haven't been able to so far, so if you have any additional hints, they'd be appreciated

No worries

As it turns out, I do have a new hint.

I added Album Artist to three tracks in MM5. When I synced to my phone, they lost the erroneous cover art, but as I mentioned before, were placed into Unknown Albums, one for each artist, which I don't want. So I removed the album artist data, the Unknown Albums disappeared, but interestingly, on sync, the erroneous art has not reappeared. In other words, adding album artist and removing it again seems to have fixed the problem.

I don't really want to have to go through that procedure for all my thousands of non-album tracks though

[Peke]

Hi,
What version of Android your device have eg. is it >= 11?

Also You made us thinking that if we assume some tag metadata is missing/unused like Album Artist or Album would mask "\Music\$if(<Album Artist>,<Album Artist>,<Artist>)\$if(<Album>,<Album>,<Title>)\$if(<Track #>,<Track #:2> ,)$Left(<Artist>,20) - <Title>" fix all your issues?
Downside is that you would either need to delete all tracks from device and resync with new mask or use buggy USB (MTP) sync with Force mask for existing tracks and do resync?

Personally I would prefer first a complete resync, but again I have <3k of tracks on device generally so it will not take hours to resync.

From my test tracks in "\Music\Unknown Artist\Unknown Album\Queen - Invisible man.mp3" would for example move to "\Music\Queen\Invisible Man\Queen - Invisible man.mp3" and you would not have Album Art issues for those tracks.

If I am correct then we are on verge finding the root cause and overall improve MMA handling Unknowns and bad tags.

Thank you for the persistence and patience, really appreciated.

[piphomer]

Hello Peke.

I'm on Android 12 (Oneplus OxygenOS)

I'm sorry, I don't understand anything about masks - this is the first time I have heard this term. Are you talking about the folders where music gets placed on my device? This is a bit of a mess on my device although I don't know why - the files are impeccably organised on my PC (take my word for it), but somehow during sync they seem to be a mess on my device. I can show you some examples if it helps.

One other thing - I take offence at the insinuation that my files are badly tagged (although I know that's not really what your'e saying ). In my opinion, if a track is a non-album track, or just not part of a full album in my collection, then the files are CORRECTLY tagged with Album and Album artist fields being empty. So MMA should be able to deal with that.

One last thing - I realised I could bulk-edit my non-album tracks to add an Album artist (I just used "Unknown"), then synced, then re-bulk-edited to remove it again from all my non-album tracks, and it has solved the problem. It remains to be seen if the problem will recur when I add new non-album tracks.

Thanks

Phil

[piphomer]

OK so I don't understand your mask script but it's clear to me now that you're definitely talking about file structure.

Why can't non-album tracks for an artist just live in the top level folder for that artist?

i.e. where the red box is in this screenshot of the file structure MMA has created on my device. It would then mirror how I have my files on my PC (and how I imagine most people do):



-Phil

[piphomer]

In that screenshot, you can see an example of the folder mess I was talking about. Paul Weller's track with filename "Uh-Huh Oh-Yeh.mp3" which has no Album or Album artist tag data, has for some reason been put into a folder "music\Uh\Huh Oh" and then renamed by MMA to "00 Paul Weller - Uh-Huh Oh-Yeh.mp3"

None of which I understand the reason for

[Lowlander]

It depends on the Mask you set in the Device Profile on how the files are stored on the device on Sync. This is what Peke has made a suggestion for.

[piphomer]

Ok - let me study the docs and give it some thought. Thanks!