Wrong cover art displayed
Answered
I have about 26,000 tracks in my music collection and about 20% of them are WAV files. BluOS is not listing some of the folders by artist even though they show up in the Folders view. Many tracks display the wrong album art even though they contain a "cover.jpg" image that's less than 600k in the respective folder. Other FLAC format tracks display the wrong cover art even where it is embedded inside the track. I can understand the software not displaying art where there isn't any, but the software is pulling art from other artists outside of the folder from where tracks are located! I have reindexed the files several times but the software still fails to correctly display the right cover art in perhaps 10% of the files.
The same artists/folders display as expected in other apps, including Music Bee,Foobar, and Groove.
I shared 2 folders with the support team, and the response, suggesting I get a metadata editor, was unhelpful. In fact, the files I shared had metadata and/or cover art meeting the under 600k bar.
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Official comment
Hi Gary, as an end user like yourself I know how frustrating artwork can be but once mastered it’s quite easy to fix. Bluesound / BluOS only reads what’s in the metadata.
NB cover.jpg takes precedence over all other artwork.
WAV files have never worked well with metadata, sorry but that’s the honest truth so you may want to put them aside for the moment and work on your FLAC files initially. If you find you struggle with WAV you could batch convert to FLAC (keep the originals stored away).
Embedded artwork can fool many as quite a few editors do not show all the embedded artwork, so removing one piece of artwork just leaves something else to take its place or occasionally just shows up randomly.
Re-indexing will not help if you make artwork changes but rebuilding the index does as it wipes everything and recreates a new BluOS index. It’s also a good idea to close the Bluesound App and reopen.
To make life easier / quicker always start with just a single Album that the artwork is not correct, don’t bother indexing all your music. This way you will save hours of time.
Would suggest you do try a program called Bliss, just test out the trial on one Album directory (make a backup first) that you have issues with, strip out the embedded artwork and add new. Sometimes despite having a cover.jpg it could be corrupt or even worse another format which has been renamed jpg. Bliss does work with WAV files.
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Hi Gary
Regarding Seppi's suggestion to use Bliss, I have a few thoughts.
Last year I tested and then started using Bliss on a few folders (I have 670 folders with approx. 83,000 files). It took me a long time to understand the complexity of Bliss and was cautious. I thought I had it right after about a month and so let it loose on all my folders, luckily I had 2 complete back ups. Bliss is a very powerful piece of software and found many, many covers, some were wrong and way too small to see clearly in BluOs which asks for pics to be smaller than 600k. I had misread this requirement and set my cover images to be 600 pixels instead, which, on a PC screen or even a larger tablet is next to useless. My fault I grant you, my point is that you have to be very aware when using Bliss, very organised and careful.\
My solution? I reinstated from a backup and have spent the last 3 months going over each album one by one manually - finding covers on the web and sizing them correctly, album by album (for me it's best at 800 pixels and this allows good quality as well as keeping the file under 600k). I won't trust software on automatic ever again for this type of task. I'm picking I'll be finished by end of March - I'm not rushing. The bonus is by doing this on such a collection I'm finding old gems I'd forgotten about!
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Hi Henri,
I purchase a lot of music from Bandcamp which often contains artwork exceeding 600k. I shouldn't have to resize the artwork or use 3-rd party software to resolve the issue. Other media players seem quite capable of handling large artwork or otherwise process artwork when indexing files. I use a 3rd party app to edit metadata and it's capable of doing lookups based on filename and automating the process, however I wouldn't trust it to batch process too many files at once and am aware that caution is warranted with these kinds of apps. At the end of the day, I believe BluOS should fix this limitation in their software rather than ask users to handle it.
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Hi Gary
I totally agree that we shouldn't have to do this, in today's world a 600k limitation is silly. I'm just trying to make do and make things work for me at this point.
I did go on to find a nice tag editor which I'm using as part of my cover art and file house keeping and it's great, but, as you say caution is warranted.👍
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